LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 



^ 



.V s * 



Sh.elf---K\..... 



+ 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



33j> %jnmc& KusBfll Lotodl. 

POEMS. Cabinet Edition. i6mo, $1.00. 

Household Edition. With Portrait. 12010, $1.50 ; full gilt, $2.00. 

Family Edition. Illustrated. 8vo, full gilt, $2.50. 

Illustrated Library Edition. 8vo, #3.00. 
THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL. Illustrated. i6mo, brocaded 

binding, $1.50. 
The Same. Illustrated by the best artists. A Holiday Book 

4to, half leather, $10.00. 
The Same. New Edition, illustrated with Photogravures and 

with Portrait. i6mo, $1.50. 

Limited Large-Paper Edition of above. i2mo, vellum, $5.00. 
The Same. With The Cathedral, etc. 32mo, 75 cents; paper, 

25 cents; i6mo, paper, 15 cents. 
THE BIG LOW PAPERS. Riverside Aldine Edition. Series 

I. and II. Each, i6mo, $1.00. 

New One Volume Edition. i6mo. 
THREE MEMORIAL POEMS. Square i6mo, $1.25. 
THE ROSE. Illustrated. 161110, S1.50. 

A FABLE FOR CRITICS. With Portraits. Crown 8vo, $1.00. 
UNDER THE OLD ELM, etc. i6mo, paper, 15 cents. 
HEARTSEASE AND RUE. i6mo, $1.25. 
FIRESIDE TRAVELS. i2mo, £1.50. 

Riverside Aldine Edition. i6mo, $1.00. 
AMONG MY BOOKS. First Series. i2mo, $2.00. 
AMONG MY BOOKS. Second Series. i2mo, $2.00. 
MY STUDY WINDOWS. 121110, $2.00. 
POLITICAL ESSAYS, nmo, $1.50. 
WORKS. 6 vols. i2mo, $10.50. 

DEMOCRACY, AND OTHER ADDRESSES. i6mo, $1.25. 
BOOKS AND LIBRARIES, etc. i6mo, paper, 15 cents. 
WORKS. New Riverside Edition. With Portraits. 10 vols. 

crown 8vo, each, $1.50; the set, $15.00. Vols. 1-4, Literary 

Essays ; 5, Political Essays 6, Literary and Political Addresses ; 

7-10, Poems. 
LOWELL BIRTHDAY BOOK. Illustrated. 321110, $i.co. 
LOWELL CALENDAR BOOK. 321110, paper, 25 cents. 
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE, etc. 321110, 75 cents. 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY, 
Boston and New York. 



IRESIDE 



Travels. 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



" Travelling makes a man sit still in his old age with satisfaction, 
md travel over the world again in his chair and bed by discourse 
and thoughts." 

Thb Voyage of Italy, by Richard Lassbls, Gent 




MAY 1 



BOSTON AND NEW YORK '. / ^ ^ yS ^ 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY. 
(Cfce fiitarisi&F &v£$$, Camfcri&fle. 
1892. 



!^^ 



Copyright, 1864 and 1892, by 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL and MABEL LOWELL BURNETT. 

All rights reserved 



The Riverside Press, Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A. 
Printed by H. C Houghton & Company. 



Fireside Travels 



THE greater part ol this volume was 
printed ten years ago in "Putnam's 
Monthly " and " Graham's Magazine." The 
additions (most of them about Italy) have 
been made up, as the original matter was, 
from old letters and journals written on the 
spot. My wish was to describe not so much 
what I went to see, as what I saw that was 
most unlike what one sees at home. If the 
reader find entertainment, he will find all 
I hoped to give him. 



w. w. s. 

Who carves his thought in marble will not scorn 
These pictured bubbles, if so far they fly ; 
They will recall days ruddy but with mom, 
Not red like these late past or drawing nigh ! 



CONTENTS 



Fjubm 

Cambridge Thirty Years Ago .... 3 

A Moosehead Journal 89 

Leaves from my Journal in Italy and elsewhere. 

At Sea ........ 155 

In the Mediterranean . . . . 175 

Italy ........ 187 

A Few Bits of Roman Mosaic . . 281 



CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

h MEMOIR ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG 
IN ROME. 

IN those quiet old winter evenings, around 
our Roman fireside, it was not seldom, my 
dear Storg, that we talked of the advantages 
of travel, and in speeches not so long that our 
cigars would forget their fire (the measure of 
just conversation) debated the comparative 
advantages of the Old and New Worlds. 
You will remember how serenely I bore the 
imputation of provincialism, while I asserted 
that those advantages were reciprocal ; that 
an orbed and balanced life would revolve be- 
tween the Old and the New as opposite, but 
not antagonistic poles, the true equator lying 
somewhere midway between them. I asserted 
also, that- there were two epochs at which a 



4 CAMBRIDGE 

man might travel, — before twenty, for pure 
enjoyment, and after thirty, for instruction. 
At twenty, the eye is sufficiently delighted 
with merely seeing ; new things are pleasant 
only because they are not old ; and we take 
everything heartily and naturally in the right 
way, — for even mishaps are like knives, 
that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp 
them by the blade or the handle. After thir- 
ty, we carry along our scales, with lawful 
weights stamped by experience, and our 
chemical tests acquired by study, with which 
to ponder and assay all arts, institutions, and 
manners, and to ascertain either their absolute 
worth or their merely relative value to our- 
selves. On the whole, I declared myself in 
favor of the after thirty method, — was it part- 
ly (so difficult is it to distinguish between 
opinions and personalities) because I had tried 
it myself, though with scales so imperfect and 
tests so inadequate? Perhaps so, but more be- 
cause I held that a man should have travelled 
thoroughly round himself and the great terra 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 5 

incognita just outside and inside his own thresh- 
old, before he undertook voyages of discovery 
to other worlds. " Far countries hf» can safest 
visit who himself is doughty," says Beowulf. 
Let him first thoroughly explore that strange 
country laid down on the maps as Seau- 
ton ; let him look down into its craters, 
and find whether they be burnt-out or only 
smouldering ; let him know between the good 
and evil fruits of its passionate tropics ; let 
him experience how healthful are its serene 
and high-lying table-lands ; let him be many 
times driven back (till he wisely consent 
to be baffled) from its speculative northwest 
passages that lead mostly to the dreary soli- 
tudes of a sunless world, before he think him- 
self morally equipped for travels to more 
distant regions. But does he commonly even 
so much as think of this, or, while buying 
amplest trunks for his corporeal apparel, does 
it once occur to him how very small a port- 
manteau will contain all his mental and spirit- 
ual outfit ? It is more often true that a man 



tf CAMBRIDGE 

who could scarce be induced to expose his 
unclothed body even to a village of prairie- 
dogs, will complacently display a mind as 
naked as the day it was born, without so 
much as a fig-leaf of acquirement on it, in 
every gallery of Europe, — 

" Not caring, so that sumpter-horse, the back, 
Be hung with gaudy trappings, in what coarse, 
Yea, rags most beggarly, they clothe the soul." 

If not with a robe dyed in the Tynan purple 
of imaginative culture, if not with the close- 
fitting, work-day dress of social or business 
training, — at least, my dear Storg, one might . 
provide himself with the merest waist-clout 
of modesty ! 

But if it be too much to expect men to 
traverse and survey themselves before they 
go abroad, we might certainly ask that they 
should be familiar with their own villages. If 
not even that, then it is of little import whith- 
er they go ; and let us hope that, by seeing 
how calmly their own narrow neighborhood 
bears their departure, they may be led to think 



THIKTY YEARS AGO. 7 

that the circles of disturbance set in motion 
by the fall of their tiny drop into the ocean of 
eternity, will not have a radius of more than a 
week in any direction ; and that the world can 
endure the subtraction of even a justice of 
the peace with provoking equanimity. In this 
way, at least, foreign travel may do them good, 
— may make them, if not wiser, at any rate 
less fussy. Is it a great way to go to school, 
and a great fee to pay for the lesson ? We 
cannot give too much for the genial stoicism 
which, when life flouts us, and says, Put that 
in your pipe and smoke it ! can puff away with 
as sincere a relish as if it were tobacco of 
Mount Lebanon in a nargliileh of Damascus. 

After all, my dear Storg, it is to know 
things that one has need to travel, and not 
men. Those force us to come to them, but 
these come to us, — sometimes whether we 
will or no. These exist f:>r us In every va- 
riety in our own town. You may find your 
antipodes without a voyage to China ; he lives 
*here, just round the next corner, precise, for 



8 CAMBRIDGE 

mal, the slave of precedent, making all his 
teacups with a break in the edge, because his 
model had one, and your fancy decorates him 
with an endlessness of airy pigtail. There, 
too, are John Bull, Jean Crapaud, Haus 
Sauerkraut, Pat Murphy, and the rest. 
It has been well said : 

" He needs no ship to cross the tide, 
Who, in the lives around him, sees 
Fair window-prospects opening wide 
O'er history's fields on every side, 
Home, Egypt, England, Ind, and Greece. 

*' Whatever moulds of various brain 
E'er shaped the world to weal or woe, 
Whatever empires' wax and wane, 
To him who hath not eyes in vain, 
His village-microcosm can show." 

But things are good for nothing out of their 
natural habitat. If the heroic Barnum had 
succeeded in transplanting Shakespeare's house 
to America, what interest would it have had 
for us, torn out of its appropriate setting in 
loftly-hilled Warwickshire, which showed us 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 9 

that the most English of poets must be born 
in the most English of counties ? 1 mean by 
x Thing that which is not a mere spectacle, 
that which some virtue of the mind leaps 
forth to, as it also sends forth its sympathetic 
flash to the mind, as soon as they come within 
pach other's sphere of attraction, and, with 
instantaneous coalition, form a new product, 
— knowledge. 

Such, in the understanding it gives us of 
early Roman history, is the little territory 
around Rome, the gentis cunabula, without 
a sight of which Livy and Niebuhr and the 
maps are vain. So, too, one must go to 
Pompeii and the Museo Borbonico, to get a 
true conception of that wondrous artistic na- 
ture of the Greeks, strong enough, even in 
that petty colony, to survive foreign conquest 
rind to assimilate barbarian blood, showing a 
grace and fertility of invention whose Roman 
copies Rafaello himself could only copy, and 
enchanting even the base utensils of the 
dtchen with an inevitable sense of beaut} 
l * 



10 CAMBRIDGE 

to which we subterranean Northmen have 
not jet so much as dreamed of climbing. 
Mere sights one can see quite as well at 
home. Mont Blanc does not tower more 
grandly in the memory than did the dream- 
peak which loomed afar on the morning 
horizon of hope, nor did the smoke-palm of 
Vesuvius stand more erect and fair, with 
tapering stem and spreading top, in that Par- 
thenopean air, than under the diviner sky 
of imagination. I know what Shakespeare 
says about homekeeping youths, and I can 
fancy what you will add about America being 
interesting only as a phenomenon, and un- 
comfortable to live in, because we have not 
yet done with getting ready to live. But is 
not your Europe, on the other hand, a place 
where men have done living for the present, 
and of value chiefly because of the men who 
had done living in it lono; ao;o ? And if, in 
our rapidly-moving country, one feel some- 
times as if he had his heme on a railroao. 
train, is there not also a satisfaction in know« 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. \\ 

ing that one is going somewhere ? To what 
end visit Europe, if people carry with them, as 
most do, their old parochial horizon, going 
hardly as Americans even, much less as men ? 
Have we not both seen persons abroad who 
put us in mind of parlor gold-fish in their 
vase, isolated in that little globe of their own 
element, incapable of communication with the 
strange world around them, a show them 
selves, while it was always doubtful if they 
could see at all beyond the limits of their 
portable prison ? The wise man travels to 
discover himself; it is to find himself out 
that he goes out of himself and his habitual 
associations, trying everything in turn till he 
find that one activity, that royal standard, 
Bovran over him by divine right, toward 
which all the disbanded powers of his nature 
and the irregular tendencies of his life gather 
joyfully, as to the common rallying-point of 
their loyalty. 

All those things we debated while the ilex 
logs apon the hearth burned down to tinkling 



12 CAMBRIDGE 

coals, over which a gray, soft moss of ashes 
grew betimes, mocking the poor wood with a 
pale travesty of that green and gradual decay 
on forest -floors, its natural end. Already the 
clock at the Cappuccini told the morning quar- 
ters, and on the pauses of our talk no sound 
intervened but the muffled hoot of an owl in 
the near convent-garden, or the rattling tramp 
of a patrol of that French army which keeps 
him a prisoner in his own city who claims to 
lock and unlock the doors of heaven. But 
still the discourse would eddy round one ob- 
stinate rocky tenet of mine, for I maintained, 
you remember, that the wisest man was he 
who stayed at home ; that to see the antiqui- 
ties of the Old World was nothing, since the 
youth of the world was really no farther away 
from us than our own youth ; and that, more- 
over, we had also in America things amazingly 
old, as our boys, for example. Add, that in 
the end this antiquity is a matter of compari- 
son, which skips from place to place as nimbly 
is Emerson's Sphinx, and that one old thing 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 13 

ls good only till we have seen an older. Eng- 
land is ancient till we go to Rome ; Etruria 
dethrones Rome, but only to pass this sceptre 
of antiquity which so lords it over our fancies 
to the Pelasgi, from whom Egypt straightway 
wrenches it, to give it up in turn to older India.. 
And whither then ? As well rest upon the 
first step, since the effect of what is old upon 
the mind is single and positive, not cumulative. 
As soon as a thing is past, it is as infinitely 
far away from us as if it had happened mil- 
lions of years ago. And if the learned Huet 
be correct, who reckoned that all human 
thoughts and records could be included in ten 
folios, what so frightfully old as we ourselves, 
who can, if we choose, hold in our memories 
every syllable of recorded time, from the first 
crunch of Eve's teeth in the apple downward, 
being thus ideally contemporary with hoariest 
Eld? 

" The pyramids built up with newer might 
To us are nothing novel, nothing strange." 

Now, my dear Storg, you know my (what 



14 CAMBRIDGE 

the phrenologists call) inhabitiveness and ad- 
hesiveness, — how I stand by the old thought, 
the old thing, the old place, and the old friend, 
till I am very sure I have got a better, and 
even then migrate painfully. Remember the 
pld Arabian story, and think how hard it is to 
pick up all the pomegranate-seeds of an oppo- 
nent's argument, and how, as long as one re- 
mains, you are as far from the end as ever. 
Since I have you entirely at my mercy, (for 
you cannot answer me under five weeks,) you 
will not be surprised at the advent of this let- 
ter. I had always one impregnable position, 
which was, that, however good other places 
might be, there was only one in which we 
could be born, and which therefore possessed 
a quite peculiar and inalienable virtue. We 
had the fortune, which neither of us have had 
reason to call other than good, to journey to- 
gether through the green, secluded valley of 
boyhood , together we climbed the mountain 
wall which shut in, and looked down upon, 
those Italian plains of early manhood ; and, 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 15 

gince then, we have met sometimes by a well, 
or broken bread together at an oasis in the arid 
desert of life, as it truly is. With this letter 1 
propose to make you my fellow-traveller in one 
of those fireside voyages which, as we grow 
older, we make oftener and oftener through 
our own past. Without leaving your elbow - 
chair, you shall go back with me thirty years, 
which will bring you among things and persons 
as thoroughly preterite as Romulus or Numa. 
For so rapid are our changes in America that 
the transition from old to new, the shifting from 
habits and associations to others entirely dif- 
ferent, is as rapid almost as the passing in of 
one scene and the drawing out of another on 
the stage. And it is this which makes Amer- 
ica so interesting to the philosophic student 
of history and man. Here, as in a theatre, 
the great problems of anthropology — which in 
the Old World were ages in solving, but which 
are solved, leaving only a dry net result — - are 
compressed, as it were, into the entertainment 
of a few hours. Here we have I know not 



16 CAMBRIDGE 

how many epochs of history and phases of civ- 
ilization contemporary with each other, nay, 
within five minutes of each other, by the elec- 
tric telegraph. In two centuries we have seen 
rehearsed the dispersion of man from a small 
point over a whole continent ; we witness with 
our own eyes the action of those forces which 
govern the great migration of the peoples now 
historical in Europe ; we can watch the action 
and reaction of different races, forms of gov- 
ernment, and higher or lower civilizations. 
Over there, you have only the dead precipi- 
tate, demanding tedious analysis ; but here the 
elements are all in solution, and we have only 
to look to know them all. History, which 
every day makes less account of governors and 
more of man, must find here the compendious 
key to all that picture-writing of the Past. 
Therefore it is, my dear Storg, that we Yan- 
kees may still esteem our America a place 
worth living in. But calm your apprehen- 
sions ; I do not propose to drag you with me 
on such an historical circumnavigation of th« 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 17 

globe, but only to show you that (however 
needful it may be to go abroad for the study 
of aesthetics) a man who uses the eyes of his 
heart may find here also pretty bits of what 
may be called the social picturesque, and little 
landscapes over which that Indian-summer at- 
mosphere of the Past broods as sweetly and 
tenderly as over a Roman ruin. Let us look 
at the Cambridge of thirty years since. 

The seat of the oldest college in America, 
it had, of course, some of that cloistered 
quiet which characterizes all university towns. 
Even now delicately-thoughtful A. H. C. tells 
me that he finds in its intellectual atmos- 
phere a repose which recalls that of grand old 
Oxford. But, underlying this, it had an 
idiosyncrasy of its own. Boston was not yet 
a city, and Cambridge was still a country 
village, with its own habits and traditions, not 
yet feeling too strongly the force of suburban 
gravitation. Approaching it from the west 
by what was then called the New Road (it is 
called so no longer, for we change our names 



18 CAMBRIDGE 

whenever we can, to the great detriment of all 
historical association), you would pause on the 
brow of Symonds' Hill to enjoy a view singu- 
larly soothing and placid. In front of you 
lay the town, tufted with elms, lindens, and 
horse-chestnuts, which had seen Massachusetts 
a colony, and were fortunately unable to emi- 
grate with the Tories by whom, or by whose 
fathers, they were planted. Over it rose the 
noisy belfry of the College, the square, brown 
tower of the church, and the slim, yellow 
spire of the parish meeting-house, by no 
means ungraceful, and then an invariable 
characteristic of New England religious archi- 
tecture. On your right, the Charles slipped 
smoothly through green and purple salt-mead- 
ows, darkened, here and there, with the 
blossoming black-grass as with a stranded 
^loud-shadow. Over these marshes, level as 
water, but without its glare, and with softer 
and more soothing gradations of perspective, 
the eye was carried to a horizon of softly- 
rounded hills. To your left hand, upon th* 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 19 

Old Road, you saw some half-dozen dignified 
Did houses of the colonial time, all comfortably 
fronting southward. If it were early June, 
the rows of horse-chestnuts along the fronts 
of these houses showed, through every crevice 
of their dark heap of foliage, and on the end 
of every drooping limb, a cone of pearly flow- 
ers, while the hill behind was white or rosy 
with the crowding blooms of various fruit- 
trees. There is no sound, unless a horseman 
clatters over the loose planks of the bridge, 
while his antipodal shadow glides silently over 
the mirrored bridge below, or unless, 

" O winged rapture, feathered soul of spring, 
Blithe voice of woods, fields, waters, all in one, 
Pipe blown through by the warm, mild breath of June 
Shepherding her white flocks of woolly clouds, 
The bobolink has come, and climbs the wind 
With rippling wings that quiver not for flight, 
But only joy, or, yielding to its will, 
Runs down, a brook of laughter, through the air." 

Such was the charmingly rural picture 
wraich he who, thirty years ago, went east- 
ward over Symonds' Hill had given him for 



20 CAMBRIDGE 

nothing, to bang in the Gallery of Memory 
But we are a city now, and Common Coun 
cils have yet no notion of the truth (learned 
long ago by many a European hamlet) that 
picturesque n ess adds to the actual money 
value of a town. To save a few dollars in 
gravel, they have cut a kind of dry ditch 
through the hill, where you suffocate with 
dust in summer, or flounder through waist- 
deep snow-drifts in winter, with no prospect 
but the crumbling earth-walls on either side. 
The landscape was carried away cart-load by 
cart-load, and, dumped down on the roads, 
forms a part of that unfathomable pudding, 
which has, I fear, driven many a teamster 
and pedestrian to the use of phrases not com- 
monly found in English dictionaries. 

We called it " the "Village " then (I speak 
of Old Cambridge), and it was essentially an 
English village, quiet, unspeculative, without 
enterprise, sufficing to itself, and only show- 
ing such differences from the original type as 
the public school and the system of town gov- 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 21 

irnment might superinduce. A few houses, 
chiefly old, stood around the bare Common, 
with ample elbow-room, and old women, 
capped and spectacled, still peered through 
the same windows from which they had 
watched Lord Percy's artillery rumble by 
to Lexington, or caught a glimpse of the 
handsome Virginia General who had come to 
wield our homespun Saxon chivalry. People 
were still living who regretted the late un- 
happy separation from the mother island, 
who had seen no gentry since the Vassalls 
went, and who thought that Boston had ill 
kept the day of her patron saint, Botolph, 
on the 17th of June, 1775. The hooks were 
to be seen from which had swung the ham- 
mocks of Burgoyne's captive redcoats. If 
memory does not deceive me, women still 
washed clothes in the town spring, clear as 
that of Bandusia. One coach sufficed for 
all the travel to the metropolis. Commence- 
ment had not ceased to be the great holiday 
of the Puritan Commonwealth, and a fitting 



22 CAMBRIDGE 

one it was, — the festival of Santa Scholas- 
tica, whose triumphal path one may conceive 
strewn with leaves of spelling-book instead 
of bay. The students (scholars they were 
called then) wore their sober uniform, not 
ostentatiously distinctive or capable of rous- 
ing democratic envy,, and the old lines of 
caste were blurred rather than rubbed out, 
as servitor was softened into beneficiary. 
The Spanish king was sure that the gesticu- 
lating student was either mad or reading Don 
Quixote, and if, in those days, you met a 
youth swinging his arms and talking to him- 
self, you might conclude that he was either 
a lunatic or one who was to appear in a 
"part" at the next Commencement. A fa- 
vorite place for the rehearsal of these orations 
was the retired amphitheatre of the Gravel- 
pit, perched unregarded on whose dizzy edge, 
I have heard many a burst of plusquam 
Ciceronian eloquence, and (often repeated) 
Lhe regular saluto vos, prcestantissimce, &c, 
w-liich every year (with a glance at the gal- 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 23 

lery) causes a flutter among the fans inno- 
cent of Latin, and delights to applauses of 
conscious superiority the youth almost as 
innocent as they. It is curious, by the way, 
to note how plainly one can feel the pulse 
of self in the plaudits of an audience. At 
a political meeting, if the enthusiasm of the 
lieges hang fire, it may be exploded at once 
by an allusion to their intelligence or patriot- 
ism ; and at a literary festival, the first Latin 
quotation draws the first applause, the clap- 
ping of hands being intended as a tribute 
to our own familiarity with that sonorous 
tongue, and not at all as an approval of the 
particular sentiment conveyed in it. For 
if the orator should say, " Well has Tacitus 
remarked, Americani omnes quddam vi naturae, 
furcd dignissimi" it would be all the same. 
But the Gravel-pit was patient, if irrespon- 
sive ; nor did the declaimer always fail to 
bring down the house, bits of loosened earth 
falling now and then from the precipitous 
walls, their cohesion perhaps overcome by 



24 CAMBRIDGE 

the vibrations of the voice, and happily sat- 
irizing the effect of most popular discourses, 
which prevail rather with the earthy than 
the spiritual part of the hearer. Was it 
possible for us in those days to conceive of 
a greater potentate than the President of 
the University, in his square doctor's cap, 
that still filially recalled Oxford and Cam- 
bridge ? If there was a doubt, it was sug- 
gested only by the Governor, and even by 
him on artillery-election days alone, superbly 
martial with epaulets and buckskin breeches, 
and bestriding the war-horse, promoted to 
that solemn duty for his tameness and steady 
habits. 

Thirty years ago, the town had indeed a 
character. Railways and omnibuses had not 
rolled flat all little social prominences and 
peculiarities, making every man as much a 
citizen everywhere as at home. No Charles- 
town boy could come to our annual festival 
without fighting to avenge a certain tradi 
dona! porcine imputation against the inhab- 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 25 

itants of that historic locality, and to which 
our youth gave vent in fanciful imitations 
of the dialect of the sty, or derisive shouts 
of " Charlestown hogs ! " The penny news- 
paper had not yet silenced the tripod of the 
barber, oracle of news. Everybody knew 
everybody, and all about everybody, and vil 
lage wit, whose high 'change was around the 
little market-house in the town square, had 
labelled every more marked individuality with 
nicknames that clung like burs. Things 
were established then, and men did not run 
through all the figures on the dial of society 
so swiftly as now, when hurry and competi- 
tion seem to have quite unhung the modulat- 
ing pendulum of steady thrift and competent 
training. Some slow-minded persons even 
followed their father's trade, — a humiliat- 
ing spectacle, rarer every day. We had our 
established loafers, topers, proverb-mongers, 
barber, parson, nay, postmaster, whose tenure 
was for life. The great political engine did 
not then come down at regular quadrennial 



26 CAMBRIDGE 

intervals, like a nail-cutting machine, to make 
all official lives of a standard length, and to 
generate lazy and intriguing expectancy. Life 
flowed in recognized channels, narrower per- 
haps, but with all the more individuality and 
force. 

There was but one white-and-yellow-wash- 
er, whose own cottage, fresh-gleaming every 
June through grape-vine and creeper, was 
his only sign and advertisement. He was 
said to possess a secret, which died with him 
like that of Luca della Robbia, and certainly 
conceived all colors but white and yellow 
to savor of savagery, civilizing the stems of 
his trees annually with liquid lime, and 
meditating how to extend that candent bap- 
tism even to the leaves. His pie-plants (the 
best in town), compulsory monastics, blanched 
under barrels, each in his little hermitage, 
a vegetable Certosa. His fowls, his ducks, 
his geese, could not show so much as a gray 
feather among them, and he would have given 
a year's earnings for a white peacock. The 



THIR'iy YEARS AGO. 27 

flowers which decked his little door-yard were 
whitest China-asters and goldenest sunflow- 
ers, which last, backsliding from their tradi- 
tional Parsee faith, used to puzzle us urchins 
not a little by staring brazenly every way 
except towards the sun. Celery, too, he 
raised, whose virtue is its paleness, and the 
silvery onion, and turnip, which, though out- 
wardly conforming to the green heresies of 
summer, nourish a purer faith subterrane- 
ously, like early Christians in the catacombs. 
In an obscure corner grew the sanguine beet, 
tolerated only for its usefulness in allaying 
the asperities of Saturday's salt-fish. He 
loved winter better than summer, because 
Nature then played the white washer, and 
challenged with her snows the scarce inferior 
purity of his overalls and neck-cloth. I fancy 
that he never rightly liked Commencement. 
For bringing so many black coats together. 
He founded no scnool Others might essay 
ais art, and were allowed to try their pren- 
tice hands on fences and the like coarse sub* 



£8 CAMBRIDGE 

jects, but the ceiling of every housewife 
waited on the leisure of Newman (ichneumon 
the students called him for his diminutive- 
ness), nor would consent to other brush than 
his. There was also but one brewer, — 
Lewis, who made the village beer, both 
spruce and ginger, a grave and amiable 
Ethiopian, making a discount always to the 
boys, and wisely, for they were his chiefest 
patrons. He wheeled his whole stock in a 
white-roofed handcart, on whose front a sign- 
board presented at either end an insurrection- 
ary bottle ; yet insurgent after no mad Gallic 
fashion, but soberly and Saxonly discharging 
itself into the restraining formulary of a 
tumbler, symbolic of orderly prescription. 
The artist had struggled manfully with the 
difficulties of his subject, but had not suc- 
ceeded so well that we did not often debate 
in which of the twin bottles Spruce was 
typified, and in which Ginger. We always 
believed that Lewis mentally distinguished 
between them, but by some peculiarity occult 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 29 

»o exoteric eyes. This ambulatory cliapel 
of the Bacchus that gives the colic, but not 
inebriates, only appeared at the Commence- 
ment holidays, and the lad who bought of 
Lewis laid out his money well, getting re- 
spect as well as beer, three sirs to every 
glass, — " Beer, sir? yes, sir : spruce or ginger, 
sir?" I can yet recall the innocent pride 
with which I walked away after that some- 
what risky ceremony, (for a bottle sometimes 
blew up,) dilated not alone with carbonic 
acid gas, but with the more ethereal fixed air 
of that titular flattery. Nor was Lewis proud. 
When he tried his fortunes in the capital 
on Election-days, and stood amid a row of 
rival venders in the very flood of custom, 
he never forgot his small fellow-citizens, but 
welcomed them with an assuring smile, and 
served them with the first. 

The barber's shop was a museum, scarce 
second to the larger one of Greenwood in 
the metropolis. The boy who was to be 
slipped there was always accompanied to the 



80 CAMBRIDGE 

sacrifice by troops of friends, who thus in- 
spected the curiosities gratis. While the 
watchful eye of R. wandered to keep in check 
these rather unscrupulous explorers, the un- 
pausing shears would sometimes overstep the 
boundaries of strict tonsorial prescription, and 
make a notch through which the phrenological 
developments could be distinctly seen. As 
Michael Angelo's design was modified by the 
shape of his block, so R., rigid in artistic 
proprieties, would contrive to give an appear- 
ance of design to this aberration, by making 
it the key-note to his work, and reducing the 
whole head to an appearance of premature 
baldness. What a charming place it was, — 
now full of wonder and delight! The sun- 
ny little room, fronting southwest upon the 
Common, rang with canaries and Java spar- 
rows, nor were the familiar notes of robin, 
thrush, and bobolink wanting. A large white 
cockatoo harangued vaguely, at intervals, in 
what we believed (on R.'s authority) to be 
the Hottentot language. He had an unvera- 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 31 

cious air, but what inventions of former grand- 
eur he was indulging in, what sweet South- 
African Argos he was remembering, what 
tropical heats and giant trees by unconjec- 
tured rivers, known only to the wallowing 
hippopotamus, we could only guess at. The 
walls were covered with curious old Dutch 
prints, beaks of albatross and penguin, and 
whales' teeth fantastically engraved. There 
was Frederick the Great, with head drooped 
plottingly, and keen side-long glance from 
under the three-cornered hat. There hung 
Bonaparte, too, the long-haired, haggard gen- 
eral of Italy, his eyes sombre with prefigured 
destiny ; and there was his island grave ; — 
the dream and the fulfilment. Good store 
of sea-fights there was also ; above all, Paul 
Jones in the Bonhomme Richard : the smoke 
rolling courteously to leeward, that we might 
see him dealing thunderous wreck to the two 
hostile vessels, each twice as large as his own, 
and the reality of the scene corroborated by 
Itreaks of red paint leaping from the mouth 



32 CAMBRIDGE 

of every gun. Suspended over the fireplace, 
with the curling-tongs, were an Indian bow 
and arrows, and in the corners of the room 
stood New Zealand paddles and war-clubs, 
quaintly carved. The model of a ship in 
glass we variously estimated to be worth from 
a hundred to a thousand dollars, R. rather 
favoring the higher valuation, though never 
distinctly committing himself. Among these 
wonders, the only suspicious one was an 
Indian tomahawk, which had too much the 
peaceful look of a shingling-hatchet. Did any 
rarity enter the town, it gravitated naturally 
to these walls, to the very nail that waited to 
receive it, and where, the day after its acces- 
sion, it seemed to have hung a lifetime. We 
always had a theory that R. was immensely 
rich, (how could he possess so much and be 
otherwise?) and that he pursued his calling 
from an amiable eccentricity. He was a con- 
scientious artist, and never submitted it to the 
choice of his victim whether he would be 
perfumed or not. Faithfully was the bottle 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 33 

shaken and the odoriferous mixture rubbed 
in, a fact redolent to the whole school-room 
in the afternoon. Sometimes the persuasive 
tonsor would impress one of the attendant 
volunteers, and reduce his poll to shoe-brush 
crispness, at cost of the reluctant ninepence 
hoarded for Fresh Pond and the next half- 
holiday. So purely indigenous was our popu- 
lation then, that R. had a certain exotic charm, 
a kind of game flavor, by being a Dutchman. 

Shall the two groceries want their vates 
sacer, where E. & W. I. goods and country 
prodooce were sold with an energy mitigated 
by the quiet genius of the place, and where 
strings of urchins waited, each with cent in 
nand, for the unweighed dates (thus giving an 
ordinary business transaction all the excite- 
ment of a lottery), and buying, not only that 
cloying sweetness, but a dream also of Egypt, 
and palm-trees, and Arabs, in which vision a 
print of the Pyramids in our geography tyran- 
nized like that taller thought of Cowper's ? 

At one of these the uc wearied students 
2* o 



34 CAMBRIDGE 

used to ply a joke handed down from class to 
class. Enter A, and asks gravely, "Have 
you any sour apples, Deacon ? " 

4 Well, no, I have n't any just now that 
are exactly sour ; but there 's the bell-flower 
apple, and folks that like a sour apple gener- 
ally like that." (Exit A.) 

Enter B. "Have you any sweet apples, 
Deacon ? " 

" Well, no, I have n't any just now that are 
exactly sweet ; but there 's the bell-flower 
apple, and folks that like a sweet apple gen- 
erally like that." (Exit B.) 

There is not even a tradition of any one's 
ever having turned the wary Deacon's flank, 
and his Laodicean apples persisted to the end, 
neither one thing nor another. Or shall the 
two town-constables be forgotten, in whom 
the law stood worthily and amply embodied, 
fit either of them to fill the uniform tf an 
English beadle ? Grim and silent as Ninevite 
Btatues they stood on each side of the meet- 
mg-house door at Commencement, propped 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 85 

by long staves of blue and red, on which the 
Indian with bow and arrow, and the mailed 
arm with the sword, hinted at the invisible 
sovereignty of the state ready to reinforce 
them, as 

" For Achilles' portrait stood a spear 
Grasped in an armed hand." 

Stalwart and rubicund men they were, second 
only, if second, to S., champion of the county, 
and not incapable of genial unbendings when 
the fasces were laid aside. One of them still 
survives in octogenarian vigor, the Herodotus 
of village and college legend, and may it be 
long ere he depart, to carry with him the pat- 
tern of a courtesy, now, alas ! old-fashioned, 
but which might profitably make part of the 
instruction of our youth among the other hu- 
manities ! Long may R. M. be spared to us, 
so genial, so courtly, the last man among us 
who will ever know how to lift a hat with the 
nice graduation of social distinction ! Some- 
thing of a Jeremiah now, he bewails the de- 
cline of our manners. " My children," he says, 



36 CAMBRIDGE 

" say, 4 Yes sir,' and 4 No sir ' ; my grand- 
children, 4 Yes ' and 4 No ' ; and I am every 
day expecting to hear ' D — n your eyes ! ' 
for an answer when I ask a service of my 
great-grandchildren. Why, sir, I can remem- 
ber when more respect was paid to Gov- 
ernor Hancock's lackey at Commencement, 
than the Governor and all his suite get now." 
M. is one of those invaluable men who re- 
member your grandfather, and value you ac- 
cordingly. 

In those days the population was almost 
wholly without foreign admixture. Two 
Scotch gardeners there were, — Rule, whose 
daughter (glimpsed perhaps at church, or 
possibly the mere Miss Harris of fancy) the 
students nicknamed Anarchy or Miss Rule, — 
and later Fraser, whom whiskey sublimed 
into a poet, full of bloody histories of the 
Forty-twa, and showing an imaginary French 
bullet, sometimes in one leg, sometimes in 
the other, and sometimes, toward nightfall, ir 
both. With this claim to military distinction 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 37 

He adroitly contrived to mingle another to a 
natural one, asserting double teetli all round 
his jaws, and, having thus created two sets 
of doubts, silenced both at once by a single 
demonstration, displaying the grinders to the 
confusion of the infidel. 

The old court-house stood then upon the 
square. It has shrunk back out of sight now, 
and students box and fence where Parson 
once laid down the law, and Ames and Dex- 
ter showed their skill in the fence of argu- 
ment. Times have changed, and manners, 
since Chief Justice Dana (father of Richard 
the First, and grandfather of Richard the 
Second) caused to be arrested for contempt 
of court a butcher who had come in with- 
out a coat to witness the administration of 
his country's laws, and who thus had his 
curiosity exemplarily gratified. Times have 
changed also since the cellar beneath it was 
tenanted by the twin-brothers Snow. Oys- 
ter men were they indeed, silent in their 
lubterranean burrow, and taking the ebbs 



38 CAMBRIDGE 

and flows of custom with bivalvian serenity. 
Careless of the months with an R in them, 
the maxim of Snow (for we knew them but as 
a unit) was, " When 'ysters are good, they 
air good ; and when they ain't, they is n't." 
Grecian F. (may his shadow never be less !) 
tells this, his great laugh expected all the 
while from deep vaults of chest, and then 
coming in at the close, hearty, contagious, 
mounting with the measured tread of a jovial 
but stately butler who brings ancientest good- 
fellowship from exhaustless bins, and enough, 
without other sauce, to give a flavor of stalled 
ox to a dinner of herbs. Let me preserve 
here an anticipatory elegy upon the Snows 
written years ago by some nameless college 
rhymer. 

DIFFUGERE NIVES. 

Here lies, or lie, — decide the question, you, 

If they were two in one or one in two, — 

P. & S. Snow, whose memory shall not fade, , 

Castor and Pollux of the oyster-trade : 

Hatched from one egg, at once the shell they burst, 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 39 

(The last, perhaps, a P. S. to the first,) 

So homoousian both in look and soul, 

So undiscernibly a single whole, 

That whether P. was S., or S. was P., 

Surpassed all skill in etymology ; 

One kept the shop at once, and alJ we know 

Is that together they were the Great Snow, 

A snow not deep, yet with a crust so thick 

It never melted to the son of Tick ; 

Perpetual ? nay, our region was too low, 

Too warm, too southern, for perpetual Snow ; 

Still, like fair Leda's sons, to whom 't was given 

To take their turns in Hades and in Heaven, 

Our new Dioscuri would bravely share 

The cellar's darkness and the upper air ; 

Twice every year would each the shades escape, 

And, like a sea-bird, seek the wave-washed Cape, 

Where (Rumor voiced) one spouse sufficed for both. 

No bigamist, for she upon her oath, 

Unskilled in letters, could not make a guess 

At any difference twixt P. and S, — 

A thing not marvellous, since Fame agrees 

They were as little different as two peas, 

And she, like Paris, when his Helen laid 

Her hand 'mid snows from Ida's top conveyed 

To cool their wine of Chios, could not know, 

Between those rival candors, which was Snow 

Whiche'er behind the counter chanced to be 

Jped oysters oft, his clam-shells seldom he ; 



10 CAMBRIDGE 

If e'er he laughed, 't was with no loud guffaw, 

The fun warmed through him with a gradual thaw; 

The nicer shades of wit were not his gift, 

Nor was it hard to sound Snow's simple drift ; 

His were plain jokes, that many a time before 

Had set his tarry messmates in a roar, 

When floundering cod beslimed the deck's wet planks,— 

The humorous specie of Newfoundland banks. 

But Snow is gone, and, let us hope, sleeps well, 
Buried (his last breath asked it) in a shell ; 
Fate with an oyster-knife sawed off his thread, 
And planted him upon his latest bed. 

Him on the Stygian shore my fancy sees 
Noting choice shoals for oyster colonies, 
Or, at a board stuck full of ghostly forks, 
Opening for practice visionary Yorks. 
And whither he has gone, may we too go, — 
Since no hot place were fit for keeping Snow ! 

Jam satis nivis. 

Cambridge has long had its port, but the 
greater part of its maritime trade was, thirty 
years ago, intrusted to a single Argo, the 
sloop Harvard, which belonged to the Col- 
lege, and made annual voyages to that vague 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 41 

Orient known as Down East, bringing back 
the wood that, in those days, gave to winter 
life at Harvard a crackle and a cheerfulness, 
for the loss of which the greater warmth of 
anthracite hardly compensates. New Eng- 
land life, to be genuine, must have in it some 
sentiment of the sea, — it was this instinct 
that printed the device of the pine-tree on 
the old money and the old flag, — and these 
periodic ventures of the sloop Harvard made 
the old Viking fibre vibrate in the hearts of 
all the village boys. What a vista of mystery 
and adventure did her sailing open to us ! 
With what pride did we hail her return ! 
She was our scholiast upon Robinson Crusoe 
and the mutiny of the Bounty. Her captain 
still lords it over our memories, the greatest 
sailor that ever sailed the seas, and we should 
not look at Sir John Franklin himself with 
such admiring interest as that w T ith which 
we enhaloed some larger boy who had made 
a voyage in her, and had come back with- 
out braces (gallowses we called them") to his 



42 CAMBRIDGE 

trousers, and squirting ostentatiously the juice 
of that weed which still gave him little pri- 
vate returns of something very like sea-sick- 
ness. All our shingle vessels were shaped 
and rigged by her, who was our glass of 
naval fashion and our mould of aquatic form. 
We had a secret and wild delight in believing 
that she carried a gun, and imagined her 
sending grape and canister among the treach- 
erous savages of Oldtown. Inspired by her 
were those first essays at navigation on the 
Winthrop duck-pond, of the plucky boy who 
was afterwards to serve two famous years be- 
fore the mast. The greater part of what is 
now Cambridgeport was then (in the native 
dialect) a huckleberry pastur. Woods were 
not wanting on its outskirts, of pine, and 
Dak, and maple, and the rarer tupelo with 
downward limbs. Its veins did not draw 
their blood from the quiet old heart of the 
village, but it had a distinct being of its own, 
and was rather a great caravansary than a 
luburb. The chief feature of the place was 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 43 

its inns, of which there were five, with vast 
barns and court-yards, which the railroad was 
to make as silent and deserted as the palaces 
of Nimroud. Great white-topped wagons, 
each drawn by double files of six or eight 
horses, with its dusty bucket swinging from 
the hinder axle, and its grim bull-dog trotting 
silent underneath, or in midsummer panting 
on the lofty perch beside the driver, (how 
elevated thither baffled conjecture,) brought 
all the wares and products of the country 
to their mart and seaport in Boston. These 
filled the inn-yards, or were ranged side by 
side under broad-roofed sheds, and far into 
the night the mirth of their lusty drivers 
clamored from the red-curtained bar-room, 
while the single lantern, swaying to and fro 
in the black cavern of the stables, made a 
Rembrandt of the group of ostlers and horses 
below. There were, beside the taverns, 
some huge square stores where groceries were 
sold, some houses, by whom or why inhabited 
was to us boys a problem, and, on the edge 



44 CAMBRIDGE 

of the marsh, a currier's shop, where, at 
high tide, on a floating platform, men were 
always beating skins in a way to remind one 
of Don Quixote's fulling-mills. Nor did these 
make all the Port. As there is always a 
Coming Man who never comes, so there is 
a man who always comes (it may be only 
a quarter of an hour) too early. This man, 
so far as the Port is concerned, was Rufus 
Davenport. Looking at the marshy flats of 
Cambridge, and considering their nearness to 
Boston, he resolved that there should grow 
up a suburban Venice. Accordingly, the 
marshes were bought, canals were dug, ample 
for the commerce of both Indies, and four 
or five rows of brick houses were built to 
meet the first wants of the wading settlers 
who were expected to rush in — whence ? 
This singular question had never occurred to 
ihe enthusiastic projector. There are laws 
wKich govern human migrations quite beyond 
tht control of the speculator, as many a man 
with desirable building-lots has discovered to 



THIRTY YEARS AGO, 45 

nis cost. Why mortal men will pay more 
for a chess-board square in that swamp, than 
for an acre on the breezy upland close by, 
who shall say? And again, why, having 
shown such a passion for your swamp, they 
are so coy of mine, who shall say? Not 
certainly any one who, like Davenport, had 
got up too early for his generation. If we 
could only carry that slow, imperturbable old 
clock of Opportunity, that never strikes a 
second too soon or too late, in our fobs, and 
push the hands forward as we can those of 
our watches ! With a foreseeing economy of 
space which now seems ludicrous, the roofs 
of this forlorn-hope of houses were made flat, 
that the swarming population might have 
where to dry their clothes. But A. U. C. 
30 showed the same view as A. U. C. 1, — 
only that the brick blocks looked as if they 
had been struck by a malaria. The dull 
weed upholstered the decaying wharves, and 
the only freight that heaped them was the 
kelp and eel-grass left by higher floods. !*»• 



16 CAMBRIDGE 

stead of a Venice, behold a Torzelo! The 
unfortunate projector took to the last refuge 
of the unhappy — book-making, and bored 
the reluctant public with what he called a 
right-aim Testament, prefaced by a recom- 
mendation from General Jackson, who per- 
haps, from its title, took it for some treatise 
on ball-practice. 

But even Cambridgeport, my dear Storg, 
did not want associations poetic and venerable. 
The stranger who took the " Hourly " at Old 
Cambridge, if he .vere a physiognomist and 
student of character, might perhaps have 
had his curiosity excited by a person who 
mounted the coach at the Port. So refined 
was his whole appearance, so fastidiously neat 
lis apparel, — but with a neatness that seemed 
\ess the result of care and plan, than a some- 
thing as proper to the man as whiteness to the 
lily, — that you would have at once classed him 
with those individuals, rarer than great cap- 
tains and almost as rare as great poets, whom 
Nature sends into the world to fil the arduous 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 47 

office of Gentleman. Were jou ever em- 
peror of that Barataria which under your 
peaceful sceptre would present, of course, a 
model of government, this remarkable person 
should be Duke of Biensdance and Master of 
Ceremonies. There are some men whom 
destiny has endowed with the faculty of ex- 
ternal neatness, whose clothes are repellent 
of dust and mud, whose un withering white 
neck-cloths persevere to the day's end, unap- 
peasably seeing the sun go down upon their 
starch, and whose linen makes you fancy 
them heirs in the maternal line to the instinct? 
of all the washerwomen from Eve downward 
There are others whose inward natures pos 
sess this fatal cleanness, incapable of moral 
dirt spot. You are not long in discovering 
that the stranger combines in himself both 
ihese properties. A nimbus of hair, fine as 
an infant's, and early white, showing refine- 
ment of organization and tha predominance 
of the spiritual over the physical, undulated 
tnd floated around a fa^e that seemed lik« 



18 CAMBRIDGE 

pale flame, and over which the flitting shades 
of expression chased each other, fugitive and 
gleaming as waves upon a field of rye. It 
was a countenance that, without any beauty 
of feature, was very beautiful. I have said 
that it looked like pale flame, and can find no 
other words for the impression it gave. Here 
was a man all soul, whose body seemed a 
lamp of finest clay, whose service was to feed 
with magic oils, rare and fragrant, that waver- 
ing fire which hovered over it. You, who 
are an adept in such matters, would have 
detected in the eyes that artist-look which 
seems to see pictures ever in the air, and 
which, if it fall on you, makes you feel as 
if all the world were a gallery, and yourself 
the rather indifferent Portrait of a Gentleman 
hung therein. As the stranger brushes by 
you in alighting, you detect a single incon- 
gruity, — a smell of dead tobacco-smoke. You 
ask his name, and the answer is, " Mr. All- 
*ton." 

'* Mr. Allston I " and you resolve to not* 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 49 

down at once in your diary every look, 
every gesture, every word of the great 
painter? Not in the least. You have the 
true Anglo-Norman indifference, and most 
likely never think of him again till you hear 
that one of his pictures has sold for a great 
price, and then contrive to let your grand- 
children know twice a week that you met him 
once in a coach, and that he said, " Excuse 
me, sir," in a very Titianesque manner, when 
he stumbled over your toes in getting out. 
Hitherto Boswell is quite as unique as Shake- 
speare. The country-gentleman, journeying 
up to London, inquires of Mistress Davenant 
at the Oxford inn the name of his pleasant 
companion of the night before. " Master 
Shakespeare, an 't please your worship." And 
the Justice, not without a sense of the un- 
bending, says, " Truly, a merry and conceited 
gentleman ! " It is lucky for the peace of 
great men that the world seldom finds out 
contemporaneously who its great men are, or, 
perhaps, that each man esteems himself the 

3 D 



50 CAMBRIDGE 

fortunate he who shall draw the lot of mem- 
ory from the helmet of the future. Had the 
eyes of some Stratford burgess been achro- 
matic telescopes, capable of a perspective of 
two hundred years ! But, even then, would 
not his record have been fuller of says I's 
than says he 's ? Nevertheless, it is curious tc 
consider from what infinitely varied points of 
view we might form our estimate of a great 
man's character, when we remember that he 
had his points of contact with the butcher, 
the baker, and the candlestick-maker, as well 
as with the ingenious A, the sublime B, and 
the Right Honorable C. If it be true that no 
man ever clean forgets everything, and that 
the act of drowning (as is asserted) forth- 
with brightens up all those o'er-rusted im- 
pressions, would it not be a curious experi- 
ment, if, after a remarkable person's death, the 
public, eager for minutest particulars, should 
gather together all who had ever been brought 
\uto relations with him, and, submerging them 
to the hairVbreadth hitherward of the drown 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 51 

tag-point, subject them to strict cross-exami- 
nation by the Humane Society, as soon as 
they become conscious between the resusci- 
tating blankets ? All of us probably have 
brushed against destiny in the street, have 
shaken hands with it, fallen asleep with it in 
railway carriages, and knocked heads with it 
in some one or other of its yet unrecognized 
incarnations. 

Will it seem like presenting a tract to a col- 
porteur, my dear Storg, if I say a word or two 
about an artist to you over there in Italy? 
Be patient, and leave your button in my 
grasp yet a little longer. A person whose 
opinion is worth having once said to me, that, 
however one's notions might be modified by 
going to Europe, one always came back with 
a higher esteem for Allston. Certainly he is 
thus far the greatest English painter of his- 
torical subjects. And only consider how 
strong must have been the artistic bias in 
him, to have made him a painter at all under 
the circumstances. There were no traditions 



52 CAMBRIDGE 

jf art, so necessary for guidance and inspira- 
tion. Blackburn, Smibert, Copley, Trumbull, 
Stuart, — it was, after all, but a Brentford 
sceptre which their heirs could aspire to, and 
theirs were not names to conjure with, like 
those from which Fame, as through a silver 
trumpet, had blown for three centuries. Cop- 
ley and Stuart were both remarkable men ; 
but the one painted like an inspired silk- 
mercer, and the other seems to have mixed 
his colors with the claret of which he and his 
generation were so fond. And what could a 
(successful artist hope for, at that time, beyond 
the mere wages of his work? His picture 
would hang in cramped back-parlors, between 
deadly cross-fires of lights, sure of the garret 
or the auction-room erelong, in a country 
where the nomad population carry no house- 
hold gods with them but their five wits and 
their ten fingers. As a race, we care noth- 
ing about Art ; but the Puritan and the 
Quaker are the only Englishmen who have 
bad pluck enough to confess it. If it were 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 53 

surprising that Allston should have become 
a painter at all, how almost miraculous that 
he should have been a great and original one ! 
We call him original deliberately, because, 
though his school is essentially Italian, it is 
of less consequence where a man buys his 
tools, than what use he makes of them. 
Enough English artists went to Italy and 
came back painting history in a very Anglo- 
Saxon manner, and creating a school as melo- 
dramatic as the French, without its perfection 
in technicalities. But Allston carried thith- 
er a nature open on the southern side, and 
brought it back so steeped in rich Italian sun- 
shine that the east winds (whether physical 
or intellectual) of Boston and the dusts of 
Cambridgeport assailed it in vain. To that 
bare wooden studio one might go to breathe 
Venetian air, and, better yet, the very spirit 
wherein the elder brothers of Art labored, 
etherealized by metaphysical speculation, and 
Bublimed by religious fervor. The beautiful 
^M man ! Here was genius with no volcanic 



i>4 CAMBRIDGE 

explosions (the mechanic result of vulgai 
gunpowder often), but lovely as a Lapland 
night; here was fame, not sought after nor 
worn in any cheap French fashion as a ribbon 
at the button-hole, but so gentle, so retiring, 
that it seemed no more than an assured and 
emboldened modesty ; here was ambition, 
undebased by rivalry and incapable of the 
sidelong look ; and all these massed and har- 
monized together into a purity and depth 
of character, into a tone, which made the 
daily life of the man the greatest master- 
piece of the artist. 

But let us go back to the Old Town. 
Thirty years since, the Muster and the Corn- 
wallis allowed some vent to those natural in- 
stincts which Puritanism scotched, but not 
killed. The Cornwallis had entered upon the 
estates of the old Guy-Fawkes procession, con- 
fiscated by the Revolution. It was a masquer- 
ade, in which that grave and suppressed hu- 
mor, of which the Yankees are fuller than 
other people, burst through all restraints, and 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 55 

disported itself in all the wildest vagaries of 
fun. Commonly the Yankee in his pleasures 
suspects the presence of Public Opinion as 
a detective, and accordingly is apt to pinion 
himself in his Sunday suit. It is a curious 
commentary on the artificiality of our lives, 
that men must be disguised and masked be- 
fore they will venture into the obscurer cor- 
ners of their individuality, and display the 
true features of their nature. One remarked 
it in the Carnival, and one especially noted 
it here among a race naturally self-restrained ; 
for Silas and Ezra and Jonas were not only 
disguised as Redcoats, Continentals, and In- 
dians, but not unfrequently disguised in drink 
also. It is a question whether the Ly- 
ceum, where the public is obliged to com- 
prehend all vagrom men, supplies the place 
of the old popular amusements. A hun- 
dred and fifty years ago, Cotton Mather be- 
wails the carnal attractions of the tavern 
Hid the training-field, and tells of an old 
Indian who imperfectly understood the Eng 



56 CAMBRIDGE 

lish tongue, but desperately mastered enough 
of it (when under sentence of death) ta 
express a desire for instant hemp rather than 
listen to any more ghostly consolations. Puri- 
tanism — I am perfectly aware how great a 
debt we owe it — tried over again the old 
experiment of driving out nature with a pitch- 
fork, and had the usual success. It was like 
a ship inwardly on fire, w T hose hatches must 
be kept hermetically battened down ; for the 
admittance of an ounce of Heaven's own 
natural air would explode it utterly. Morals 
can never be safely embodied in the consta- 
ble. Polished, cultivated, fascinating Mephis- 
topheles ! it is for the ungovernable breakings- 
away of the soul from unnatural compressions 
that thou waitest with a deprecatory smile. 
Then it is that thou offerest thy gentlemanly 
arm to unguarded youth for a pleasant stroll 
through the City of Destruction, and, as a 
special favor, introducest him to the bewitch- 
ing Miss Circe, and to that model of the 
Hospitable old English gentleman, Mr. Comus 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 57 

But the Muster and the Cornwallis were 
not peculiar to Cambridge. Commencement- 
day was. Saint Pedagogus was a worthy 
whose feast could be celebrated by men who 
quarrelled with minced-pies, and blasphemed 
custard through the nose. The holiday pre- 
served all the features of an English fair. 
Stations were marked out beforehand by the 
town constables, and distinguished by num- 
bered stakes. These were assigned to the 
different venders of small wares and exhibiters 
of rarities, whose canvas booths, beginning at 
the market-place, sometimes half encircled the 
Common with their jovial embrace. Now all 
the Jehoiada-boxes in town were forced to 
give up their rattling deposits of specie, if not 
through the legitimate orifice, then to the 
brute force of the hammer. For hither were 
come all the wonders of the world, making 
the Arabian Nights seem possible, and which 
we beheld for half price ; not without min- 
gled emotions, — pleasure at the economy, and 
shame at not paying the more manly fea 

3* 



58 CAMBRIDGE 

Here the mummy unveiled her withered 
charms, — a more marvellous Ninon, still at- 
tractive in her three-thousandth year. Here 
were the Siamese twins ; ah ! if all such forced 
and unnatural unions were made a show of! 
Here were the flying horses (their supernatu- 
ral effect injured — like that of some poems — 
by the visibility of the man who turned the 
crank), on which, as we tilted at the ring, we 
felt our shoulders tingle with the accolade, and 
heard the clink of golden spurs at our heels. 
Are the realities of life ever worth half so 
much as its cheats ? And are there any feasts 
half so filling at the price as those Barmecide 
ones spread for us by Imagination ? Hither 
came the Canadian giant, surreptitiously seen, 
without price, as he alighted, in broad day, 
(giants were always foolish,) at the tavern. 
Hither came the great horse Columbus, with 
shoes two inches thick, and more wisely in- 
troduced by night. In the trough of the 
town-pump might be seen the mermaid, its 
Door monkey's head carefully sustained above 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 59 

water, to keep it from drowning. There were 
dwarfs, also, who danced and sang, and many 
a proprietor regretted the transaudient proper- 
ties of canvas, which allowed the frugal public 
to share in the melody without entering the 
booth. Is it a slander of J. H., who reports 
that he once saw a deacon, eminent for psal- 
mody, lingering near one of those vocal tents, 
and, with an assumed air of abstraction, fur- 
tively drinking in, with unhabitual ears, a 
song, not secular merely, but with a dash of 
libertinism ? The New England proverb says, 
" All deacons are good, but — there 's odds in 
deacons." On these days Snow became super- 
terranean, and had a stand in the square, and 
Lewis temperately contended with the strong- 
er fascinations of egg-pop. But space would 
tail me to make a catalogue of everything. 
No doubt, Wisdom also, as usual, had her 
auiet booth at the corner of some street, with- 
out entrance-fee, and, even at that rate, got 
aever a customer the whole day long. For 
the bankrupt afternoon there were peep-shows, 
at a cent each. 



60 CAMBRIDGE 

But all these shows and their showmen are 
as clean gone now as those of Csesar and 
Timour and Napoleon, for which the world 
paid dearer. They are utterly gone out, not 
leaving so much as a snuff behind, — as little 
thought of now as that John Robins, who 
was once so considerable a phenomenon as to 
be esteemed the last great Antichrist and son 
of perdition by the entire sect of Muggleto- 
nians. Were Commencement what it used to 
be, I should be tempted to take a booth my- 
self, and try an experiment recommended by 
a satirist of some merit, whose works were 
long ago dead and (I fear) deedeed to boot. 

" Menenius, thou who fain wouldst know how calmly men 

can pass 
Those biting portraits of themselves, disguised as fox or 

ass, — 
Go borrow coin enough to buy a full-length psyche-glass, 
Engage a rather darkish room in some well-sought position, 
And let the town break out with bills, so much per head 

admission, — 
Great natural curiosity ! ! The biggest living 

fool ! ! 
Arrange your mirror cleverly, before it set a stool, 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 61 

Admit the public one by one, place each upon the seat, 
Draw up the curtain, let him look his fill, and then re 

treat. 
Smith mounts and takes a thorough view, then comes 

serenely down, 
Goes home and tells his wife the thing is curiously like 

Brown ; 
Brown goes and stares, and tells his wife the wonder's 

core and pith 
Is that 't is just the counterpart of that conceited Smith. 
Life calls us all to such a show : Menenius, trust in me, 
While thou to see thy neighbor smil'st, he does the same 

for thee." 

My dear Storg, would you come to my 
show, and, instead of looking in my glass, 
insist on taking your money's worth in star- 
ing at the exhibitor? 

Not least among the curiosities which the 
day brought together were some of the grad- 
uates, posthumous men, as it were, disen- 
tombed from country parishes and district- 
schools, but perennial also, in whom freshly 
survived all the college jokes, and who had 
no intelligence later than their Senior year, 
these had gathered to eat the College dinner, 



02 CAMBRIDGE 

and to get the Triennial Catalogue (their libro 
d'oro*), referred to oftener than any volume but 
the Concordance. Aspiring men they were 
certainly, but in a right unworldly way ; this 
scholastic festival opening a peaceful path to 
the ambition which might else have devastated 
mankind with Prolusions on the Pentateuch, 
or Genealogies of the Dormouse Family. For 
since in the academic processions the classes 
are ranked in the order of their graduation, 
and he has the best chance at the dinner who 
has the fewest teeth to eat it with, so, by 
degrees, there springs up a competition in 
longevity, — the prize contended for being 
the oldest surviving graduateship. This is an 
office, it is true, without emolument, but hav- 
ing certain advantages, nevertheless. The 
incumbent, if he come to Commencement, is 
a prodigious lion, and commonly gets a para- 
graph in the newspapers once a year with 
the (fiftieth) last survivor of Washington'?- 
Life-Guard. If a clergyman, he is expected 
tc ask a blessing and return thanks at tb* 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 63 

iinner. a function which he performs with 
centenarian longanimity, as if he reckoned 
the ordinary life of man to be fivescore years, 
and that a grace must be long to reacli so 
far away as heaven. Accordingly, this silent 
race is watched, on the course of the Cata- 
logue, with an interest worthy of Newmarket ; 
and as star after star rises in the galaxy of 
death, till one name is left alone, an oasis 
of life in the stellar desert, it grows solemn. 
The natural feeling is reversed, and it is the 
solitary life that becomes sad and monitory, 
the Stylites there on the lonely top of his 
century-pillar, who has heard the passing-bejl 
of youth, love, friendship, hope, — of every- 
thing but immitigable eld. 

Dr. K. was President of the University 
then, a man of genius, but of genius that 
evaded utilization, — a great water-power, but 
without rapids, and flowing with too smooth 
and gentle a current to be set turning wheels 
and whirling spindles. His was not that rest- 
less genius of which the man seems to be 



64 CAMBRIDGE 

merely the representative, and which wreakg 
itself in literature or politics, but of that milder 
sort, quite as genuine, and perhaps of more 
contemporaneous value, which is the man, 
permeating the whole life with placid force, 
and giving to word, look, and gesture a mean- 
ing only justifiable by our belief in a reserved 
power of latent reinforcement. The man of 
talents possesses them like so many tools, does 
his job with them, and there an end ; but the 
man of genius is possessed by it, and it makes 
him into a book or a life according to its 
whim. Talent takes the existing moulds, and 
makes its castings, better or worse, of richer 
or baser metal, according to knack and op- 
portunity ; but genius is always shaping new 
ones, and runs the man in them, so that there 
is always that human feel in its results 
which gives us a kindred thrill. What it will 
make, we can only conjecture, contented al- 
ways with knowing the infinite balance of 
possibility against which it can draw at pleas- 
ore. Have you ever seen a man whose check 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. t>5 

would be honored for a million pay his toll 
of one cent? and has not that bit of copper, 
no bigger than your own, and piled with it 
by the careless toll-man, given you a tingling 
vision of what golden bridges he could pass, — 
into what Elysian regions of taste and enjoy- 
ment and culture, barred to the rest of us? 
Something like it is the impression made by 
such characters as K.'s on those who come 
in contact with them. 

There was that in the soft and rounded (I 
had almost said melting) outlines of his face 
which reminded one of Chaucer. The head 
had a placid yet dignified droop like his. He 
was an anachronism, fitter to have been Ab- 
bot of Fountains or Bishop Golias, courtier 
and priest, humorist and lord spiritual, all in 
one, than for the mastership of a provincial 
college, which combined, with its purely scho- 
lastic functions, those of accountant and chief 
of police. For keeping books he was incom- 
petent (unless it were those he borrowed), 
and the only discipline he exercised was by 



66 CAMBRIDGE 

the unobtrusive pressure of a gentlemanliness 
which rendered insubordination to him impos- 
sible. But the world always judges a man 
(and rightly enough, too) by his little faults, 
which he shows a hundred times a day, rather 
than by his great virtues, which he discloses 
perhaps but once in a lifetime, and to a single 
person, — nay, in proportion as they are rarer, 
and he is nobler, is shyer of letting their ex- 
istence be known at all. He was one of those 
misplaced persons whose misfortune it is that 
their lives overlap two distinct eras, and are 
already so impregnated with one that they 
can never be in healthy sympathy with the 
other. Born when the New England clergy 
were still an establishment and an aristocracy, 
and when office was almost always for life, 
and often hereditary, he lived to be thrown 
upon a time when avocations of all colors 
mio;ht be shuffled together in the life of one 
man, like a pack of cards, so that you could 
not prophe&v that he who was ordained to-day 
might not accept a colonelcy of filibusters to 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 67 

pnorrow. Such temperaments as his attach 
themselves, like barnacles, to what seems per- 
manent ; but presently the good ship Progress 
weighs anchor, and whirls them away from 
drowsy tropic inlets to arctic waters of unnat- 
ural ice. To such crustaceous natures, created 
to cling upon the immemorial rock amid softest 
mosses, comes the bustling Nineteenth Cen- 
tury and says, " Come, come, bestir yourself 
and be practical ! get out of that old shell of 
yours forthwith ! " Alas ! to get out of the 
shell is to die ! 

One of the old travellers in South America 
tells of fishes that built their nests in trees 
(piscium et summa hcesit genus ulmo), and 
gives a print of the mother fish upon her nest, 
while her mate mounts perpendicularly to her 
without aid of legs or wings. Life shows 
plenty of such incongruities between a man's 
place and his nature, (not so easily got over 
as by the traveller's undoubting engraver,) 
and one cannot help fancying that K. was 
in instance in point. Hi never encountered. 



(58 CAMBRIDGE 

one would say, the attraction proper to draw 
out his native force. Certainly, few men who 
impressed others so strongly, and of whom so 
many good things are remembered, left less 
behind them to justify contemporary esti- 
mates. He printed nothing, and was, per- 
haps, one of those the electric sparkles of 
whose brains, discharged naturally and health- 
ily in conversation, refuse to pass through the 
nonconducting medium of the inkstand. His 
ana would make a delightful collection. One 
or two of his official ones will be in place 
here. Hearing that Porter's flip (which was 
exemplary) had too great an attraction for 
the collegians, he resolved to investigate the 
matter himself. Accordingly, entering the 
eld inn one day, he called for a mug of it, 
and, having drunk it, said, "And so, Mr. 
Porter, the young gentlemen come to drink 
vour flip, do they ? " " Yes, sir, — some- 
times." " Ah, well, I should think they 
would. Good day, Mr. Porter," and de- 
Darted, saying nothing more ; for he alwayi 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 69 

wisely allowed for tne existence cf a certain 
amount of human nature in ingenuous youth. 
At another time the " Harvard Washington " 
asked leave to go into Boston to a collation 
which had been offered them. " Certainly, 
young gentlemen," said the President, "but 
have you engaged any one to bring home 
your muskets ? " — the College being respon- 
sible for these weapons, winch belonged to 
the State. Again, when a student came with 
a physician's certificate, and asked leave of 
absence, K. granted it at once, and then 
added, "By the way, Mr. — , persons in- 
terested in the relation which exists between 
states of the atmosphere and health have no- 
ticed a curious fact in regard to the climate 
of Cambridge, especially within the College 
limits, — the very small number of deaths in 
proportion to the cases of dangerous illness." 
This is told of Judge W., himself a wit, and 
capable of enjoying the humorous delicacy 
&f the reproof. 
Shall I take Brahmin Alcott's favorite 



70 CAMBRIDGE 

word, and call him a daemonic man? No, 
the Latin genius is quite old-fashioned enough 
for me, means the same thing, and its deriva 
tive geniality expresses, moreover, the base 
of K.'s beino;. How he suggested cloistered 

O DO 

repose, and quadrangles mossy with centurial 
associations ! How easy he was, and how 
without creak was every movement of his 
mind ! This life was good enough for him, 
and the next not too good. The gentleman- 
like pervaded even his prayers. His were 
not the manners of a man of the world, nor 
of a man of the other world either ; but both 
met in him to balance each other in a beau- 
tiful equilibrium. Praying, he leaned forward 
upon the pulpit-cushion as for conversation, 
and seemed to feel himself (without irrever- 
ence) on terms of friendly, but courteous, 
familiarity with Heaven. The expression of 
.lis face was that of tranquil contentment, and 
be appeared less to be supplicating expected 
mercies than thankful for those already found, 
— as if he were saying the gratias in the refeo 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 71 

tory of the Abbey of Theleme. Under him 
flourished the Harvard Washington Corps, 
whose gyrating banner, inscribed Tarn Marti 
quam Mercurio (atqui magis Lyceo should have 
been added), on the evening of training-days, 
was an accurate dynamometer of Willard's 
punch or Porter's flip. It was they who, af- 
ter being royally entertained by a maiden 
lady of the tow r n, entered in their orderly book 
a vote that Miss Blank was a gentleman. I 
see them now, returning from the imminent 
deadly breach of the law of Rechab, unable 
to form other than the serpentine line of 
beauty, while their officers, brotherly rather 
than imperious, instead of reprimanding, tear- 
fully embraced the more eccentric w r anderers 
from military precision. Under him the Med. 
Facs. took their equal place among the learned 
societies of Europe, numbering among their 
grateful honorary members Alexander, Em- 
peror of all the Russias. who (if College le- 
gends may be trusted) sent them in return 
for their diploma a gift of medals confiscated 



12 CAMBRIDGE 

by the authorities. Under him the College 
fire-engine was vigilant and active in suppress- 
ing any tendency to spontaneous combustion 
among the Freshmen, or rushed wildly to im- 
aginary conflagrations, generally in a direc- 
tion where punch was to be had. All these 
useful conductors for the natural electricity 
of youth, dispersing it or turning it harmlessly 
into the earth, are taken away now, — wisely 
or not, is questionable. 

An academic town, in whose atmosphere 
there is always something antiseptic, seems 
naturally to draw to itself certain varieties 
and to preserve certain humors (in the Ben 
Jonsonian sense) of character, — men who 
come not to study so much as to be studied. 
^t the head-quarters of Washington once, 
and now of the Muses, lived C , but be- 
fore the date of these recollections. Here for 
seven years (as the law was then) he made 
his house his castle, sunning himself in his 
elbow-chair at the front-door, on that seventh 
day, secure from every arrest but Death's. 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 73 

Here long survived him his turban ed widow, 
studious only of Spinoza, and refusing to 
molest the canker-worms that annually dis- 
leaved her elms, because we were all vermic- 
lalar alike. She had been a famous beauty 
once, but the canker years had left her leaf- 
less, too ; and I used to wonder, as I saw her 
sitting always alone at her accustomed window, 
whether she were ever visited by the reproach- 
ful shade of him who (in spite of Rosalind) 
died broken-hearted for her in her radiant 
youth. 

And this reminds me of J. F., who, also 
crossed in love, allowed no mortal eye to be- 
hold his face for many years. The eremitic 
instinct is not peculiar to the Thebais, as many 
a New England village can testify; and it 
is worthy of consideration that the Romish 
Church has not forgotten this among her other 
points of intimate contact with human na- 
ture. F. became purely vespertinal, never 
stirring abroad till after dark. He occupied 
two rooms, migrating from one to the other* 



74 CAMBRIDGE 

as the necessities of housewifery demanded, 
thus shunning all sight of womankind, and be- 
ing practically more solitary in his dual apart- 
ment than Montaigne's Dean of St. Hilaire in 
his single one. When it was requisite that lie 
should put his signature to any legal instru- 
ment, (for he was an anchorite of ample 
means,) he wrapped himself in a blanket, al- 
lowing nothing to be seen but the hand which 
acted as scribe. What impressed us boys more 
than anything else was the rumor that he had 
suffered his beard to grow, — such an anti- 
Sheffieldism being almost unheard of in those 
days, and the peculiar ornament of man being 
associated in our minds with nothing more re- 
cent than the patriarchs and apostles, whose 
effigies we were obliged to solace ourselves 
with weekly in the Family Bible. He came 
cut of his oysterhood at last, and I knew him 
well, a kind-hearted man, who gave annual 
sleigh-rides to the town -paupers, and supplied 
the poor children with school-books. His fa- 
vorite topic of conversation was Eternity, and, 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 75 

like many other worthy persons, he used to 
fancy that meaning was an affair of aggrega- 
tion, and that he doubled the intensity of what 
he said by the sole aid of the multiplication- 
table. " Eternity ! " he used to say, " it is not 
a day ; it is not a year ; it is not a hundred 
years ; it is not a thousand years ; it is not a 
million years ; no, sir," (the sir being thrown 
in to recall wandering attention,) " it is not 
ten million years ! " and so on, his enthusiasm 
becoming a mere frenzy when he got among 
his sextillions, till I sometimes wished he had 
continued in retirement. He used to sit at 
the open window during thunder-storms, and 
had a Grecian feeling about death by light- 
ning. In a certain sense he had his desire, 
for he died suddenly, — not by fire from 
heaven, but by the red flash of apoplexy, 
leaving his whole estate to charitable uses. 

If K. were out of place as President, that 
was not P. as GreeK Professor. Who that 
fcver saw him can forget him, in his old age, 
like a lusty winter, frosty but kindly, with 



76 CAMBRIDGE 

great silver spectacles of the heroic period, 
such as scarce twelve noses of these deo-en- 
erate days could bear? He was a natural 
celibate, not dwelling "like the fly in the 
heart of the apple," bat like a lonely bee 
rather, absconding himself in Hymettian flow- 
ers, incapable of matrimony as a solitary palm- 
tree. There was, to be sure, a tradition of 
youthful disappointment, and a touching story 
which L. told me perhaps confirms it. When 

Mrs. died, a carriage with blinds drawn 

followed the funeral train at some distance, 
and, when the coffin had been lowered into 
the grave, drove hastily away to escape that 
saddest of earthly sounds, the first rattle of 
earth upon the lid. It was afterward known 
that the carriage held a single mourner, — 
our grim and undemonstrative Professor. Yet 
I cannot bring myself to suppose him sus- 
ceptible to any tender passion after that sin- 
gle lapse in the immaturity of reason. He 
might have joined the Abderites in singing 
their mad chorus from the Andromeda ; but 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 77 

it would have been in deference to the lan- 
guage merely, and with a silent protest against 
the sentiment. I fancy him arranging his 
scrupulous toilet, not for Amaryllis or Nesera, 
but, like Machiavelli, for the society of his 
beloved classics. His ears had needed no 
prophylactic wax to pass the Sirens' isle ; nay, 
he would have kept them the wider open, 
studious of the dialect in which they sang, 
and perhaps triumphantly detecting the iEolic 
digamma in their lay. A thoroughly single 
man, single-minded, single-hearted, button- 
ing over his single heart a single-breasted 
surtout, and wearing always a hat of a sin- 
gle fashion, — did he in secret regard the 
dual number of his favorite language as a 
weakness ? The son of an officer of distinc- 
tion in the Revolutionary War, he mounted 
the pulpit witn the erect port of a soldier, 
ati carried his cane more in the fashion of 
n weapon than a staff, but with the point 
lowered, in token of surrender to the peace- 
ful proprieties of his calling- Yet sometime? 



78 CAMBRIDGE 

the martial instincts would burst the cere- 
ments of black coat and clerical neckcloth, 
as once, when the students had got into a 
fight upon the training-field, and the licen- 
tious soldiery, furious with rum, had driven 
them at point of bayonet to the College gates, 
and even threatened to lift their arms against 
the Muses' bower. Then, like Major Goffe 
at Deerfield, suddenly appeared the gray- 
haired P., all bis father resurgent in him, and 
shouted : " Now, my lads, stand your ground, 
you 're in the right now ! Don't let one of 
them set foot within the College grounds ! " 
Thus he allowed arms to get the better of 
the toga; but raised it, like the Prophet's 
breeches, into a banner, and carefully ushered 
resistance with a preamble of infringed right. 
Fidelity was his strong characteristic, and 
burned equably in him through a life of eighty- 
three years. He drilled himself till inflexible 
Qabit stood sentinel before all those postern- 
tveaknesses which temperament leaves un 
Doited to temptation. A lover of the scholar'? 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 79 

herb, yet loving freedom more, and knowing 
that the animal appetites ever hold one hand 
behind them for Satan to drop a bribe in, he 
would never have two cigars in his house at 
once, but walked every day to the shop to 
fetch his single diurnal solace. Nor would 
he trust himself with two on Saturdays, pre- 
ferring (since he could not violate the Sab- 
bath even by that infinitesimal traffic) to 
depend on Providential ravens, which were 
seldom wanting in the shape of some black- 
coated friend who knew his need, and honored 
the scruple that occasioned it. He was faith- 
ful, also, to his old hats, in which appeared 
the constant service of the antique world, and 
which he preserved forever, piled like a black 
pagoda under his dressing-table. No scare- 
crow was ever the residuary legatee of Ms 
beavers, though one of them in any of the 
neighboring peach-orchards would have been 
sovereign against an attack of Freshmen. He 
wore them all in turn, getting through all in 
the course of the year, like the sun through 



80 CAMBRIDGE 

the signs of the zodiac, modulating them ac- 
cording to seasons and celestial phenomena, 
so that never was spider-web or chick weed 
so sensitive a weather-gauge as they. Nor 
did his political party find him less loyal. 
Taking all the tickets, he would seat himself 
apart, and carefully compare them with the 
list of regular nominations as printed in his 
Daily Advertiser, before he dropped his ballot 
in the box. In less ambitious moments, it 
almost seems to me that I would rather have 
had that slow, conscientious vote of P.'s 
alone, than to have been chosen Alderman 
of the Ward ! 

If you had walked to what was then Sweet 
Auburn by the pleasant Old Road, on some 
June morning thirty years ago, you would 
very likely have met two other characteristic 
persons, both phantasmagoric now, and be- 
longing to the past. Fifty years earlier, the 
scarlet-coated, rapiered figures of Vassall, 
Lechmere, Oliver, and Brattle creaked up 
and down there on red-heeled shoes, lifting 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 81 

the ceremonious three-cornered hat, and offer- 
ing the fugacious hospitalities of the snuff-box. 
They are all shadowy alike now, not one of 
your Etruscan Lucumos or Roman Consuls 
more so, my dear Storg. First is W., his 
queue slender and tapering, like the tail of a 
violet crab, held out horizontally by the high 
collar of his shepherd's-gray overcoat, whose 
style was of the latest when he studied at 
Leyden in his hot youth. The age of cheap 
clothes sees no more of those faithful old gar- 
ments, as proper to their wearers and as 
distinctive as the barks of trees, and by long 
use interpenetrated with their very nature. 
Nor do we see so many Humors (still in the 
old sense) now that every man's soul belongs 
to the Public, as when social distinctions were 
more marked, and men felt that their person- 
alities were their castles, in which they could 
intrench themselves against the world. Now- 
a-days men are shy of letting their true selves 
be seen, as if in some former life they had 
committed a crime, and were all the time 

4* F 



82 CAMBRIDGE 

afraid of discovery and arrest in this. For- 
merly they used to insist on your giving the 
wall to their peculiarities, and you may stih 
find examples of it in the parson or the doctor 
of retired villages. One of W.'s oddities was 
touching. A little brook used to run across 
the street, and the sidewalk was carried over it 
by a broad stone. Of course there is no brook 
now. What use did that little glimpse of a 
ripple serve, where the children used to launch 
their chip fleets? W., in going over this stone, 
which gave a hollow resonance to the tread, 
had a trick of striking upon it three times 
with his cane, and muttering, " Tom, Tom, 
Tom ! " I used to think he was only mimick- 
ing -with his voice the sound of the blows, and 

a ' 

possibly it was that sound which suggested his 
thought, for he was remembering a favorite 

a " a 

nephew, prematurely dead. Perhaps Tom had 
sailed his boats there ; perhaps the reverbera- 
tion under the old man's foot hinted at the 
uollownefcs of life ; perhaps "the fleeting eddies 
of the water brought to mind the fugaces aw 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 83 

nos. W., like P., wore amazing spectacles, 
fit to transmit no smaller image than the page 
of mightiest folios of Dioscorides or Hercules 
de Saxonia, and rising full-disked upon the 
beholder like those prodigies of two moons 
at once, portending change to monarchs. The 
great collar disallowing any independent rota- 
tion of the head, I remember he used to turn 
his whole person in order to bring their foci 
to bear upon an object. One can fancy that 
terrified Nature would have yielded up her 
secrets at once, without cross-examination, at 
their first glare. Through them he had gazed 
fondly into the great mare's-nest of Junius, 
publishing his observations upon the eggs 
found therein in a tall octavo. It was he 
who introduced vaccination to this Western 

if}: 

World. Malicious persons disputing his claim 
to this distinction, he published this advertise- 
ment : " Lost, a gold snuff-box, with the in- 
scription, 4 The Jenner of the Old World to 
the Jenner of the New.' Whoever shall re- 
turn the same to Dr. — shall be suitably 



84 CAMBRIDGE 

rewarded." It was never returned. Would 
the search after it have been as fruitless aa 
that of the alchemist after his equally imagi- 
nary gold ? Malicious persons persisted in 
believing the box as visionary as the claim 
it was meant to buttress with a semblance of 
reality. He used to stop and say good morn- 
ing kindly, and pat the shoulder of the blush- 
ing school-boy who now, with the fierce snow- 
storm wildering without, sits and remembers 
sadly those old meetings and partings in the 
June sunshine. 

Then there was S., whose resounding "Haw, 
haw, haw ! by George ! " positively enlarged 
the income of every dweller in Cambridge. 
In downright, honest good cheer and good 
neighborhood, it was worth five hundred a 
year to every one of us. Its jovial thunders 
cleared the mental air of every sulky cloud. 
Perpetual childhood dwelt in him, the child- 
hood of his native Southern France, and its 
fixed air was all the time bubbling up and 
sparkling and winking in his eyes. It seemed 



THIRTY YEARS AGO 85 

ts if his placid old face were only a mask 
behind which a merry Cupid had ambushed 
himself, peeping out all the while, and ready 
to drop it when the play grew tiresome. 
Every word he uttered seemed to be hilarious, 
no matter what the occasion. If he were sick, 
and you visited him, if he had met with a 
misfortune, (and there are few men so wise 
that they can look even at the back of a re- 
tiring sorrow with composure,) it was all one ; 
his great laugh went off as if it were set like 
an alarm-clock, to run down, whether he 
would or no, at a certain nick. Even after 
an ordinary Good morning ! (especially if to 
an old pupil, and in French,) the wonderful 
Saw, haw, haw I by George! would burst 
upon you unexpectedly, like a salute of artil- 
lery on some holiday which you had forgotten. 
Everything was a joke to him, — that the oath 
of allegiance had been administered to him 
by your grandfather, — that he had taught 
Prescott his first Spanish (of *vhich he was 
proud), — no matter what. Everything came 



86 CAMBRIDGE 

to him marked by Nature Right side up, with 
care, and he kept it so. The world to him, 
as to all of us, was like a medal, on the ob- 
verse of which is stamped the image of Joy, 
and on the reverse that of Care. S. never 
took the foolish pains to look at that other 
side, even if he knew its existence ; much 
less would it have occurred to him to turn 
it into view, and insist that his friends should 
look at it with him. Nor was this a mere 
outside good-humor; its source was deeper, 
in a true Christian kindliness and amenity. 
Once, when he had been knocked down by a 
tipsily-driven sleigh, and was urged to prose- 
cute the offenders, "No, no," he said, his 
wounds still fresh, "young blood! young blood ! 
it must have its way; I was young myself." 
Was ! few men come into life so young as S. 
went out. He landed in Boston (then the 
front door of America) in '93, and, in honor 
of the ceremony, had his head powdered afresh, 
una put on a suit of court-mourning before 
he set foot on the wharf. My fancy alwayi 



THIRTY YEARS AGO. 87 

dressed him in that violet silk, and his soul 
certainly wore a full court-suit. What was 
there ever like his bow ? It was as if you had 
received a decoration, and could write your- 
self gentleman from that day forth. His hat 
rose, regreeting your own, and, having sailed 
through the stately curve of the old regime^ 
sank gently back over that placid brain, which 
harbored no thought less wdiite than the pow- 
der which covered it. I have sometimes im- 
agined that there was a graduated arc over hb 
head, invisible to other eyes than his, by which 
he meted out to each his rightful share of cas- 
torial consideration. I carry in my memory 
three exemplary bows. The first is that of 
an old beggar, who, already carrying in his 
hand a white hat, the gift of benevolence, took 
off the black one from his head also, and pro- 
foundly saluted me with both at once, giving 
me, in return for my alms, a dual benediction, 
puzzling as a nod from Janus Bifrons. The 
second I received from an old Cardinal, who 
was taking his walk just outside the Porta San 



68 CAMBRIDGE THIRTY YEARS AGO. 

Giovanni at Rome. I paid him the courtesy 
due to his age and rank. Forthwith rose, 
first, the Hat ; second, the hat of his confessor ; 
third, that of another priest who attended 
him ; fourth, the fringed cocked-hat of his 
coachman ; fifth and sixth, the ditto, ditto, 
of his two footmen. Here was an invest- 
ment, indeed ; six hundred per cent interest 
on a single bow ! The third bow, worthy to 
be noted in one's almanac among the other 
mirabilia, was that of S., in which courtesy 
had mounted to the last round of her ladder, 
— and tried to draw it up after her. 

But the genial veteran is gone even while 
I am writing this, and I will play Old Mor- 
tality no longer. Wandering among these 
recent graves, my dear friend, we may chance 

upon ; but no, I will not end my sen 

tence. I bid you heartily farewell ! 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 

ADDRESSED TO THE EDELMANN STORG AT THE 
BAGNI DI LUCCA. 

THURSDAY, 11th August— I knew as 
little yesterday of the interior of Maine 
as the least penetrating person knows of the 
inside of that great social millstone which, 
driven by the river Time, sets imperatively 
agoing the several wheels of our individual 
activities. Born while Maine was still a 
province of native Massachusetts, I was as 
much a foreigner to it as yourself, my dear 
Storg. I had seen many lakes, ranging from 
that of Virgil's Cum^ean to that of Scott's 
Caledonian Lady ; but Moosehead, within two 
days of me, had never enjoyed the profit of 
being mirrored in my retina. At the sound 
of the name, no remmiscential atoms (ac- 



90 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 



cording to Kenelm Digby's Theory of Asso- 
ciation, — as good as any) stirred and mar- 
shalled themselves in my brain. The truth 
is, we think lightly of Nature's penny shows, 
and estimate what we see by the cost of 
the ticket. Empedocles gave his life for a 
pit-entrance to ^JEtna, and no doubt found 
his account in it. Accordingly, the clean 
face of Cousin Bull is imaged patronizingly 
in Lake George, and Loch Lomond glass- 
es the hurried countenance of Jonathan, 
diving deeper in the streams of European 
association (and coming up drier) than any 
other man. Or is the cause of our not car- 
ing to see what is equally within the reach 
of all our neighbors to be sought in that aris- 
tocratic principle so deeply implanted in hu- 
man nature ? I knew a pauper graduate who 
always borrowed a black coat, and came to 
eat the Commencement dinner, — not that it 
was better than the one which daily graced 
the board of the public institution in which 
ne hibernated (so to speak) during the othei 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 91 

three hundred and sixty-four days of the year, 
save in this one particular, that none of his 
eleemosynary fellow-commoners could eat it. 
If there are unhappy men who wish that they 
were as the Babe Unborn, there are more 
who would aspire to the lonely distinction 
of being that other figurative personage, the 
Oldest Inhabitant. You remember the charm- 
ing irresolution of our dear Esthwaite, (like 
Macheath between his two doxies,) divided 
between his theory that he is under thirty, 
and his pride at being the only one of us who 
witnessed the September gale and the rejoi- 
cings at the Peace ? Nineteen years ago I 
was walking through the Franconia Notch, 
and stopped to chat with a hermit, who fed 
with gradual logs the unwearied teeth of a 
saw-mill. As the panting steel slit off the 
slabs of the log, so did the less willing machine 
of talk, acquiring a steadier up-and-down mo- 
lion, pare away that outward bark of conver- 
sation which protects the core, and which, like 
other bark, has naturally most to do with the 



02 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

weather, the season, and the heat of the day. 
At length I asked him the best point of view 
for the Old Man of the Mountain. 

" Dunno, — never see it." 

Too young and too happy either to feel or 
affect the Juvenalian indifference, I was sin- 
cerely astonished, and I expressed it. 

The log-compelling man attempted no justi- 
fication, but after a little asked, " Come from 
Bawsn ? " 

" Yes " (with peninsular pride). 

" Goodie w c?e in the vycinity o' Bawsn." 

" O yes ! " I said, and I thought, — see 
Boston and die ! see the State-Houses, old and 
new, the caterpillar wooden bridges crawling 
with innumerable legs across the flats of 
Charles ; see the Common, — largest park, 
doubtless, in the world, — with its files of 
trees planted as if by a drill-sergeant, and 
ihen for your nunc dimittis! 

" I should like, 'awl, I should like to stan 
on Bunker Hill. You 've ben there offen, 
ikely ? " 



A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL. 93 

"N — o — o," unwillingly, seeing the little 
end of the horn in clear vision at the termi- 
nus of this Socratic perspective. 

" 'Awl, my young frien', you 've larned 
neow thet wut a man kin see any day for 
nawthin', childern half price, he never doos 
see. Nawthin' pay, nawthin' vally." 

With this modern instance of a wise saw, 
I departed, deeply revolving these things with 
myself, and convinced that, whatever the ratio 
of population, the average amount of human 
nature to the square mile is the same the 
world over. I thought of it when I saw 
people upon the Pincian wondering at the 
Alchemist sun, as if he never burned the 
leaden clouds to gold in sight of Charles 
Street. I thought of it when I found eyes first 
discovering at Mont Blanc how beautiful snow 
vas. As I walked on, I said to myself, There 
i& one exception, wise hermit, — it is just these 
gratis pictures which the poet puts in his 
show-box, and which we all gladly pay Words- 
worth and the rest for a peep at. The di- 



94 A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL. 

vine faculty is to see what everybody can 
look at. 

While every well-informed man in Europe, 
from the barber down to the diplomatist, has 
his view of the Eastern Question, why should 
I not go personally down East and see for 
myself? Why not, like Tancred, attempt 
my own solution of the Mystery of the Ori- 
ent, — doubly mysterious when you begin the 
two words with capitals ? You know my way 
of doing things, to let them simmer in my 
mind gently for months, and at last do them 
impromptu in a kind of desperation, driven by 
the Eumenides of unfulfilled purpose. So, 
after talking about Moosehead till nobody be- 
lieved me capable of going thither, I found 
myself at the Eastern Railway station. The 
only event of the journey hither (I am now 
at Waterville) was a boy hawking exhilarat- 
ingly the last great railroad smash, — thirteen 
lives lost, — and no doubt devoutly wishing 
there had been fifty. This having a mercan- 
tile interest in horrors, holding stock, as it 



A MOOSE HEAD JOURNAL. 95 

were, in murder, misfortune, and pestilence, 
must have an odd effect on the human mind. 
The birds of ill-omen, at whose sombre flight 
the rest of the world turn pale, are the ravens 
which bring food to this little outcast in the 
wilderness. If this lad give thanks for daily 
bread, it would be curious to inquire what 
that phrase represents to his understanding. 
If there ever be a plum in it, it is Sin or 
Death that puts it in. Other details of my 
dreadful ride I will spare you. Suffice it that 
I arrived here in safety, — in complexion like 
an Ethiopian serenader half got-up, and so 
broiled and peppered that I was more like 
i devilled kidney than anything else I can 
think of. 

10 p. M. — The civil landlord and neat 
chamber at the "Elmwood House " were very 
grateful, and after tea I set forth to explore 
the town. It has a good chance of being 
pretty ; but, like most American towns, it is 
in a hobbledehoy age, growing yet, and one 
sannot tell what may happen. A child witl 



96 A MOOSE HEAD JOURNAL. 

great promise of beauty is often spoiled by its 
second teeth. There is something agreeable 
in the sense of completeness which a walled 
town gives one. It is entire, like a crystal, — 
a work which man has succeeded in finishing. 
I think the human mind pines more or less 
where everything is new, and is better for a 
diet of stale bread. The number of Ameri- 
cans who visit the Old World is beginning 
to afford matter of speculation to observant 
Europeans, and the deep inspirations with 
which they breathe the air of antiquity, as 
if their mental lungs had been starved with 
too thin an atmosphere. For my own part, 
I never saw a house which I thought old 
enough to be torn down. It is too like that 
Scythian fashion of knocking old people on 
the head. I cannot help thinking that the 
indefinable something which we call character 
is cumulative, — that the influence of the same 
climate, scenery, and associations for several 
generations is necessary to its gathering head, 
and that the process is disturbed by con 



A MOOSE HE A D JOURNAL. 97 

hnual change of place. The American ia 
nomadic in religion, in ideas, in morals, and 
leaves his faith and opinions with as much 
indifference as the house in which he was 
born. However, we need not bother: Na- 
ture takes care not to leave out of the great 
heart of society either of its two ventricles 
of hold-back and go-ahead. 

It seems as if every considerable American 
town must have its one specimen of every- 
thing, and so there is a college in Waterville, 
the buildings of which are three in number, 
of brick, and quite up to the average ugliness 
which seems essential in edifices of this de- 
scription. Unhappily, they do not reach that 
extreme of ugliness where it and beauty come 
together in the clasp of fascination. We erect 
handsomer factories for cottons, woollens, and 
steam-engines, than for doctors, lawyers, and 
oarsons. The truth is, that, till our struggle 
with nature is over, till this shaggy hemi- 
sphere is tamed and subjugated, the workshop 
will be the college whose degrees will be most 



08 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

7alued. Moreover, steam has made travel so 
easy that the great university of the world is 
open to all comers, and the old cloister sys- 
tem is falling astern. Perhaps it is only the 
more needed, and, were I rich, I should like 
to found a few lazyships in my Alma Mater 
as a kind of counterpoise. The Anglo-Saxon 
race has accepted the primal curse as a bless- 
ing, has deified work, and would not have 
thanked Adam for abstaining from the apple. 
They would have dammed the four rivers 
of Paradise, substituted cotton for fig-leaves 
among the antediluvian populations, and com- 
mended man's first disobedience as a wise 
measure of political economy. But to return 
to our college. We cannot have fine build- 
ings till we are less in a hurry. We snatch 
an education like a meal at a railroad-station. 
Just in time to make us dyspeptic, the whistle 
shrieks, and we must rush, or lose our places 
in the great train of life. Yet noble architec- 
ture is one element of patriotism, and an emi- 
nent one of culture, the finer portions of 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 99 

which are taken in by unconscious absorption 
through the pores of the mind from the sur- 
rounding atmosphere. I suppose we must 
wait, for we are a great bivouac as yet rather 
than a nation, — on the march from the At- 
lantic to the Pacific, — and pitch tents instead 
of building houses. Our very villages seem 
to be in motion, following westward the be- 
witching music of some Pied Piper of Hame- 
lin. We still feel the great push toward sun- 
down given to the peoples somewhere in the 
gray dawn of history. The cliff-swallow alone 
of all animated nature emigrates eastward. 

Friday, 12t7i. — The coach leaves Water- 
ville at five o'clock in the morning, and one 
must breakfast in the dark at a quarter past 
four, because a train starts at twenty minutes 
before five, — the passengers by both convey- 
ances being pastured gregariously. So one 
must be up at half past three. The primary 
geological formations contain no trace of man, 
and it seems to me that these eocene periods 
&f the day are not fitted for sustaining the 



[00 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

human forms of life. One of the fathers held 
that the sun was created to be worshipped at 
his rising by the Gentiles. The more reason 
that Christians (except, perhaps, early Chris- 
tians) should abstain from these heathenish 
ceremonials. As one arriving by an early 
train is welcomed by a drowsy maid with the 
sleep scarce brushed out of her hair, and 
finds empty grates and polished mahogany, 
on whose arid plains the pioneers of break- 
fast have not yet encamped, so a person waked 
thus unseasonably is sent into the world be- 
fore his faculties are up and dressed to serve 
him. It might have been for this reason that 
my stomach resented for several hours a piece 
of fried beefsteak which I forced upon it, or, 
more properly speaking, a piece of that leath- 
ern conveniency which in these regions as- 
sumes the name. You will find it as hard 
to believe, my dear Storg, as that quarrel 
of the Sorbonists, whether one should say 
%go amat or no, that the use of the gridiron 
is unknown hereabout, and so near a rivei 
aamed after St. Lawrence, too I 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 101 

To-day has been the hottest day of the 
Beason, yet our drive has not been unpleasant. 
For a considerable distance we followed the 
course of the Sebasticook River, a pretty 
stream with alternations of dark brown pools 
and wine-colored rapids. On each side of thp 
road the land had been cleared, and little 
one-story farm-houses were scattered at inter- 
vals. But the stumps still held out in most 
of the fields, and the tangled wilderness closed 
in behind, striped here and there with the 
slim white trunks of the elm. As yet only 
the edges of the great forest have been nib- 
bled away. Sometimes a root-fence stretched 
up its bleaching antlers, like the trophies of 
a giant hunter. Now and then the houses 
thickened into an unsocial-looking village, and 
we drove up to the grocery to leave and take 
a mail-bag, stopping again presently to water 
the horses at some pallid little tavern, whose 
Dne red-curtained eye (the bar-room) had 
been put out by the inexorable thrust of Maine 
Law. Had Shenstone travelled this road, he 



102 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

would never have written that famous stanza 
of his ; had Johnson, he would never have 
quoted it. They are to real inns as the skull 
of Yorick to his face. Where these villages 
occurred at a distance from the river, it was 
difficult to account for them. On the river- 
bank, a saw-mill or a tannery served as a logi- 
cal premise, and saved them from total incon- 
sequentiality. As we trailed along, at the 
rate of about four miles an hour, it was dis- 
covered that one of our mail-bags was missing. 
" Guess somebody '11 pick it up," saia the 
driver coolly ; " 't any rate, likely there 's 
nothin' in it." Who knows how long it took 
some Elam D. or Zebulon K. to compose the 
missive intrusted to that vagrant bag, and 
how much ^nger to persuade Pamela Grace 
or Sophionia Melissa that it had really and 
truly been written ? The discovery of our 
loss was made by a tall man who sat next to 
me on the top of the coach, every one of 
whose senses seemed to be prosecuting ita 
•fcv-eral investigation as we went along. Pres- 



a MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 103 

ently, sniffing gently, he remarked: "'Pears 
to me 's though I smelt sunthin'. Ain't the 
aix het, think ? " The driver pulled up, and, 
sure enough, the oft" fore- wheel was found 
to be smoking. In three minutes he had 
snatched a rail from the fence, made a lever, 
raised the coach, and taken off the wheel, 
bathing the hot axle and box with water from 
the river. It was a pretty spot, and I was 
not sorry to lie under a beech-tree (Tityrus- 
like, meditating over my pipe) and watch the 
operations of the fire-annihilator. I could not 
help contrasting the ready helpfulness of our 
driver, all of whose wits were about him, cur- 
rent, and redeemable in the specie of action on 
emergency, with an incident of travel in Italy, 
where, under a somewhat similar stress of cir- 
cumstances, our vetturino had nothing for it 
but to dash his hat on the ground and call on 
Sant' Antonio, the Italian Hercules. 

There being four passengers for the Lake, 
a vehicle called a mud-wagon was detailed 
it Newport for our accommodation. In tbia 



104 A MOOSE HEAD JOURNAL. 

we jolted and rattled along at a livelier pace 
than in the coach. As we got farther north, 
the country (especially the hills) gave evi- 
dence of longer cultivation. About the thriv- 
ing town of Dexter we saw fine farms anci 
crops. The houses, too, became prettier ; 
hop-vines were trained about the doors, and 
hung their clustering thyrsi over the open 
windows. A kind of wild rose (called by 
the country folk the primrose) and asters were 
planted about the door-yards, and orchards, 
commonly of natural fruit, added to the pleas- 
ant home-look. But everywhere we could 
Bee that the war between the white man and 
the forest was still fierce, and that it would 
be a long while yet before the axe was buried. 
The haying being over, fires blazed or smoul- 
dered against the stumps in the fields, and the 
blue smoke widened slowly upward through 
the quiet August atmosphere. It seemed to 
me that I could hear a sigh now and then 
from the immemorial pines, as they stood 
matching these camp-fires of the ine^rnWr 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 105 

invader. Evening set in, and, as we crunched 
and crawled up the long gravelly hills, I some- 
times began to fancy that Nature had forgot- 
ten to make the corresponding descent on 
the other side. But erelong we were rush- 
ing down at full speed ; and, inspired by the 
dactylic beat of the horses' hoof's, I essayed 
to repeat the opening lines of Evangeline. 
At the moment I was beginning, we plunged 
into a hollow, where the soft clay had been 
overcome by a road of unhewn logs. I got 
through one line to this corduroy accompani- 
ment, somewhat as a country choir stretches 
a short metre on the Procrustean rack of a long- 
drawn tune. The result was like this : — 

*• Thihis ihis thehe fohorest prihihimeheval ; thehe murhur- 
muring pihines hahand thehe hehemlohocks ! " 

At a quarter past eleven, p. m., we reached 
Greenville, (a little village which looks as 
if it had dripped down from the hills, and 
settled in the hollow at the foot of the lake,) 
Having accomplished seventy-two miles in 

5* 



106 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

eighteen hours. The tavern was totally ex- 
tinguished. The driver rapped upon the 
bar-room window, and after a while we saw 
heat-lia-htnincrs of unsuccessful matches fol- 
lowed by a low grumble of vocal thunder, 
which I am afraid took the form of impreca- 
tion. Presently there was a great success, 
and the steady blur of lighted tallow succeeded 
the fugitive brilliance of the pine. A hostler 
fumbled the door open, and stood staring at 
but not seeing us, with the sleep sticking out 
all over him. We at last contrived to launch 
him, more like an insensible missile than an 
intelligent or intelligible being, at the slum- 
bering landlord, who came out wide-awake, 
and welcomed us as so many half-dollars, — 
twenty-five cents each for bed, ditto breakfast. 
O Shenstone, Shenstone ! The only roost 
was in the garret, which had been made into 
a single room, and contained eleven double« 
beds, ranged along the walls. It was like 
Bleeping in a hospital. However, nice cus- 
toms curtsy to eighteen-hour rides, and we 
slept. 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 107 

Saturday, WZth. — This morning I per- 
formed my toilet in the bar-room, where 
there was an abundant supply of water, and 
a halo of interested spectators. After a suffi- 
cient breakfast, we embarked on the little 
steamer Moosehead, and were soon throbbing 
up the lake. The boat, it appeared, had been 
chartered by a party, this not being one of 
her regular trips. Accordingly we were 
mulcted in twice the usual fee, the philosophy 
of which I could not understand. However, 
it always comes easier to us to comprehend 
why we receive than why we pay. I dare 
say it was quite clear to the captain. There 
were three or four clearings on the western 
shore ; but after passing these, the lake be- 
came wholly primeval, and looked to us as it 
did to the first adventurous Frenchman who 
paddled across it. Sometimes a cleared point 
would be pink with the blossoming willow- 
herb, " a cheap and excellent substitute " for 
heather, and, like all such, not quite so good 
as the real thing. On all sides rose deep-blue 



108 A MOObEHEAD JOURNAL 

mountains, of remarkably graceful outline, 
and more fortunate than common in their 
names. There were the Big and Little Squaw, 
the Spencer and Lily-bay Mountains. It was 
debated whether we saw Katahdin or not, (per- 
haps more useful as an intellectual exercise 
than the assured vision would have been.) and 
presently Mount Kineo rose abruptly before 
us, in shape not unlike the island of Capri. 
Mountains are called great natural features, 
and why they should not retain their names 
long enough for them also to become natural- 
ized, it is hard to say. Why should every new 
surveyor rechristen them with the gubernato- 
rial patronymics of the current year ? They 
are geological noses, and, as they are aquiline 
*\r pug, indicate terrestrial idiosyncrasies. A 
cosmical physiognomist, after a glance at them, 
will draw no vague inference as to the char- 
acter of the country. The word nose is no 
better than any other word ; but since the 
organ has got that name, it is convenient to 
keep it. Suppose we had to label our facia 






A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL. 109 

prominences every season with the name of 
our provincial governor, how should we like 
it ? If the old names have no other mean- 
ing, they have that of age ; and, after all, 
meaning is a plant of slow growth, as every 
reader of Shakespeare knows. It is web 
enough to call mountains after their discover- 
ers, for Nature has a knack of throwing 
doublets, and somehow contrives it that dis- 
coverers have good names. Pike's Peak is 
a curious hit in this way. But these sur- 
veyors' names have no natural stick in them. 
They remind one of the epithets of poet- 
asters, which peel off like a badly gummed 
postage-stamp. The early settlers did better, 
and there is something pleasant in the sound 
of Graylock, Saddleback, and Great Hay 
stack. 

" I love those names 

Wherewith the exiled farmer tames 

Nature down to companionship 

With his old world's more homely mood, 

And strives the shaggj wild to clip 
With arms of familiar habitude." 



110 A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL. 

It is possible that Mount Marcy and Mount 
Hitchcock may sound as well hereafter as 
Hellespont and Peloponnesus, when the heroes, 
their namesakes, have become mythic with 
antiquity. But that is to look forward a great 
way. I am no fanatic for Indian nomencla- 
ture, — the name of my native district having 
been Pigsgusset, — but let us at least agree 
on names for ten years. 

There were a couple of loggers on board, 
in red flannel shirts, and with rifles. They 
were the first I had seen, and I was interested 
in their appearance. They were tall, well- 
knit men, straight as Robin Hood, and with 
a quiet, self-contained look that pleased me. 
I fell into talk with one of them. 

"Is there a good market for the farmers 
here in the woods ? " I asked. 

" None better. They can sell what they 
raise at their doors, and for the best of prices. 
The lumberers want it all, and more." 

44 It must be a lonely life. But then we al 1 
Dave to pay more or less life for a living." 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. \\\ 

" Well, it is lonesome. Should n't like it. 
After all, the best crop a man can raise is a 
good crop of society. We don't live none too 
long, anyhow ; and without society a fellow 
could n't tell more 'n half the time whether 
he was alive or not." 

This speech gave me a glimpse into the life 
of the lumberers' camp. It was plain that 
there a man would soon find out how much 
alive he was, — there he could learn to esti- 
mate his quality, weighed in the nicest self- 
adjusting balance. The best arm at the axe 
or the paddle, the surest eye for a road or 
for the weak point of a jam, the steadiest foot 
upon the squirming log, the most persuasive 
voice to the tugging oxen, — all these things 
are rapidly settled, and so an aristocracy is 
svolved from this democracy of the woods, 
for good old mother Nature speaks Saxon 
still, and with her either Canning or Ken- 
ning means King. 

A string of five loons was flying back and 
forth in Jong, irregular zigzags, uttering at 



112 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

intervals their wild, tremulous cry, which 
always seems far away, like the last faint 
pulse of echo dying among the hills, and 
which is one of those few sounds that, in- 
stead of disturbing solitude, only deepen and 
confirm it. On our inland ponds they are 
usually seen in pairs, and I asked if it were 
common to meet five together. My ques- 
tion was answered by a queer-looking old 
man, chiefly remarkable for a pair of enormous 
cowhide boots, over which large blue trousers 
of frocking strove in vain to crowd them- 
selves. 

" Walil, 't ain't ushil," said he, " and it 's 
called a sign o' rain comin', that is." 

" Do you think it will rain ? " 

With the caution of a veteran auspex, he 
evaded a direct reply. " Wahl, they du say 
it 's a sign o' rain comin','' said he. 

I discovered afterward that my interlocutor 
was Uncle Zeb. Formerly, every New Eng- 
and town had its representative uncle. He 
was not a pawnbroker, but some elderly mac 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 113 

who, for want of more defined family ties, 
had gradually assumed this avuncular relation 
to the community, inhabiting the border-land 
between respectability and the almshouse, with 
no regular calling, but working at haying, 
wood-sawing, whitewashing, associated with 
the demise of pigs and the ailments of cattle, 
and possessing as much patriotism as might 
be implied in a devoted attachment to " New 
England " — with a good deal of sugar and 
very little water in it. Uncle Zeb was a 
good specimen of this palasozoic class, extinct 
among us for the most part, or surviving, like 
the Dodo, in the Botany Bays of society. He 
was ready to contribute (somewhat muddily) 
to all general conversation ; but his chief 
topics were his boots and the 'Roostick war. 
Upon the lowlands and levels of ordinary 
palaver he would make rapid and unlooked-for 
incursions ; but, provision failing, he would 
retreat to these two fastnesses, whence it was 
impossible to dislodge him, and to which he 
Knew innumerable passes and short cuts quite 



114 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

beyond the conjecture of common woodcraft, 
His mind opened naturally to these two sub- 
jects, like a book to some favorite passage. 
As the ear accustoms itself to any sound re- 
curring regularly, such as the ticking of a 
dock, and, without a conscious effort of atten- 
tion, takes no impression from it whatever, 
bo does the mind find a natural safeguard 
against this pendulum species of discourse, 
and performs its duties in the parliament by 
an unconscious reflex action, like the beating 
of the heart or the movement of the lungs. 
If talk seemed to be flagging, our Uncle would 
put the heel of one boot upon the toe of the 
other, to bring it within point-blank range, 
and say, " Wahl, I stump the Devil himself 
to make that 'ere boot hurt my foot," leaving 
us in doubt whether it were the virtue of 
the foot or its case which set at naught the 
wiles of the adversary ; or, looking up sud- 
denly, he would exclaim, " Wahl, we eat 
wme beans to the 'Roostick war, I tell youP 
When his poor old clay was wet with gin, 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. Ho 

his thoughts and words acquired a rank flavor 
from it, as from too strong a fertilizer. At 
such times, too, his fancy commonly reverted 
to a pre-historic period of his life, when he 
singly had settled all the surrounding coun- 
try, subdued the Injuns and other wild ani- 
mals, and named all the towns. 

We talked of the winter-camps and the life 
there. " The best thing is," said our Uncle, 
" to hear a log squeal thru the snow. Git 
a good, cole, frosty mornin', in Febuary say, 
an' take an' hitch the critters on to a log 
that '11 scale seven thousan', an' it '11 squeal 
as pooty as an'thin' you ever heam, I tell 
you." 

A pause. 

" Lessee, — seen Cal Hutchins lately ? " 

"No." 

" Seems to me 's though I hed n't seen Cal 
sence the 'Roostick war. Wahl," &c, &c. 

Another pause. 

" To look at them boots you 'd think they 
wsls too large ; but kind o' git your foot into 



116 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

'em, and they're as easy 's a glove." (I ob- 
served that he never seemed really to get his 
foot in, — there was always a qualifying kind 
o'.) " Wahl, my foot can play in 'em like 
a young hedgehog." 

By this time we had arrived at Kineo, — a 
flourishing village of one house, the tavern 
kept by 'Squire Barrows. The 'Squire is a 
large, hearty man, with«a voice as clear and 
strong as a northwest wind, and a great laugh 
suitable to it. His table is neat and well sup- 
plied, and he waits upon it himself in the good 
old landlordly fashion. One may be much 
better off here, to my thinking, than in one 
of those gigantic Columbaria which are foisted 
upon us patient Americans for hotels, and 
where one is packed away in a pigeon-hole 
so near the heavens that, if the comet should 
dirt its tail, (no unlikely thing in tbe month 
of. flies,) one would be in danger of being 
brushed away. Here one does not pay his 
diurnal three dollars for an undivided five- 
hundredth part of the pleasure of looking at 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 117 

gilt gingerbread. Here one's relations are 
with the monarch himself, and one is not 
obliged to wait the slow leisure of those " at- 
tentive clerks " whose praises are sung by 
thankful deadheads, and to whom the slave 
who pays may feel as much gratitude as might 
thrill the heart of a brown-paper parcel to- 
ward the express-man who labels it and 
chucks it under his counter. 

Sunday, l^th. — The loons were right. 
About midnight it began to rain in earnest, 
and did not hold up till about ten o'clock this 
morning. " This is a Maine dew," said a 
shaggy woodman cheerily, as he shook the 
water out of his wide-awake, " if it don't look 
out sharp, it '11 begin to rain afore it thinks 
0>n 't." The day was mostly spent within 
doors ; but I found good and intelligent so- 
ciety. We should have to be shipwrecked on 
Juan Fernandez not to find men who knew 
more than we. In these travelling encounters 
one is thrown upon his own resources, and is 
wcrth just what he carries about him. The 



118 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

locial currency of home, the smooth-worn coin 
which passes freely among friends and neigh- 
bors, is of no account. We are thrown hack 
upon the old system of barter ; and, even with 
savages, we bring away only as much of the 
wild wealth of the woods as we carry beads 
of thought and experience, strung one by one 
in painful years, to pay for them with. A use- 
ful old jackknife will buy more than the dain- 
tiest Louis Quinze paper-folder fresh from 
Paris. Perhaps the kind of intelligence one 
gets in these out-of-the-way places is the best, 
— where one takes a fresh man after break- 
fast instead of the damp morning paper, and 
where the magnetic telegraph of human 
sympathy flashes swift news from brain to 
brain. 

Meanwhile, at a pinch, to-morrow's weather 
t'an be discussed. The augury from the flight 
•)f birds is favorable, — the loons no longer 
prophesying rain. The wind also is hauling 
round to the right quarter, according to some, 
to the wrong, if we are to believe others, 



/ 

A MOkjSEHEAD journal. 119 

Each man has his private barometer of hope, 
the mercury in which is more or less sensitive, 
and the opinion vibrant with its rise or fall. 
Mine has an index which can be moved me- 
chanically. I fixed it at set fair, and resigned 
myself. I read an old volume of the Patent- 
Office Report on Agriculture, and stored away 
a beautiful pile of facts and observations for 
future use, which the current of occupation, 
at its first freshet, would sweep quietly off to 
blank oblivion. Practical application is the 
only mordant which will set things in the 
memory. Study, without it, is gymnastics, 
and not work, which alone will get intellectual 
bread. One learns more metaphysics from a 
single temptation than from all the philoso- 
phers. It is curious, though, how tyrannical 
the habit of reading is, and what shifts we 
make to escape thinking. There is no bore 
we dread being left alone with so much as 
Mir own minds. I have seen a sensible man 
study a stale newspaper in a co-mtry tavern, 
and husband it as he would an old shoe on 



120 ^ MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL. 

a raft after shipwreck. Why not try a bit 
of hibernation ? There are few brains that 
would not be better for living on their own 
fat a little while. With these reflections, I 9 
notwithstanding, spent the afternoon over my 
Report. If our own experience is of so little 
use to us, what a dolt is he who recommends 
to man or nation the experience of others ! 
Like the mantle in the old ballad, it is always 
too short or too long, and exposes or trips us 
up. " Keep out of that candle," says old 
Father Miller, " or you '11 get a singeing." 
" Pooh, pooh, father, I 've been dipped in the 
new asbestos preparation," and frozz! it is all 
over with young Hopeful. How many warn- 
ings have been drawn from Pretorian bands, 
and Janizaries, and Mamelukes, to make Na- 
poleon III. impossible in 1851 ! I found my- 
self thinking the same thoughts over again, 
when we walked later on the beach and picked 
up pebbles. The old time-ocean throws upon 
its shores just such rounded and polished re- 
sults of the eternal turmoil, but we only see 



A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL. 121 

the beauty of those we have got the headache 
in stooping for ourselves, and wonder at the 
dull brown bits of common stone with which 
our comrades have stuffed their pockets. Af- 
terwards this little fable came of it. 

DOCTOR LOBSTER. 

A perch, who had the toothache, once 
Thus moaned, like any human dunce : 
" Why must great souls exhaust so soon 
Life's thin and unsubstantial boon ? 
Existence on such sculpin terms, — 
Their vulgar loves and hard- won worms,— 
What is it all but dross to me, 
Whose nature craves a larger sea ; 
Whose inches, six from head to tail, 
Enclose the spirit of a whale ; 
Who, if great baits were still to win, 
By watchful eye and fearless fin 
Might with the Zodiac's awful twain 
Room for a third immortal gain ? 
Better the crowd's unthinking plan, — 
The hook, the jerk, the frying-pan ! 
O Death, thou ever roaming shark, 
Ingulf me in eternal dark ! " 

The speech was cut in two by flight : 
A real shark had come in sight ; 



122 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

No metaphoric monster, one 
It soothes despair to call upon, 
But stealthy, sidelong, grim, I wis, 
A bit of downright Nemesis ; 
While it recovered from the shock, 
Our fish took shelter 'neath a rock : 
This was an ancient lobster's house, 
A lobster of prodigious nous, 
So old that barnacles had spread 
Their white encampments o'er its head, 
And of experience so stupend, 
His claws were blunted at the end, 
Turning life's iron pages o'er, 
That shut and can be oped no more. 

Stretching a hospitable claw, 

"At once," said he, " the point I saw ; 

My dear young friend, your case I rue, 

Your great-great-grandfather I knew ; 

He was a tried and tender friend 

I know, — I ate him in the end : 

In this vile sea a pilgrim long, 

Still my sight's good, my memory strong 

The only sign that age is near 

Is a slight deafness in this ear ; 

I understand your case as well 

As this my old familiar shell ; 

This sorrow 's a new-fangled notion, 

Come in since first I knew the ocean ; 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 128 

We had no radicals, nor crimes, 
Nor lobster -pots, in good old times ; 
Your traps and nets and hooks we owe 
To Messieurs Louis Blanc and Co. ; 
I say to all my sons and daughters, 
Shun Red Republican hot waters ; 
No lobster ever cast his lot 
Among the reds, but went to pot : 
Your trouble 's in the jaw, you said ? 
Come, let me just nip off your head, 
And, when a new one comes, the pain 
Will never trouble you again : 
Nay, nay, fear naught : 't is nature's law. 
Four times I 've lost this starboard claw 
And still, erelong, another grew, 
Good as the old, — and better too ! " 

The perch consented, and next day 
An osprey, marketing that way, 
Picked up a fish without a head, 
Floating with belly up, stone dead. 

MORAL. 

Sharp are the teeth of ancient saws, 
And sauce for goose is gander's sauce ; 
But perch's heads are n't lobster's claws. 

Monday y Ibth. — The morning was fine, 
and we were called at four o'clock. At the 



124 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

moment my door was knocked at, I was mount- 
ing a giraffe with that charming nil admiran 
which characterizes dreams, to visit Prester 
John. Rat-tat-tat-tat ! upon my door and 
upon the horn gate of dreams also. I re- 
marked to my skowhegan (the Tatar for 
giraffe-driver) that I was quite sure the ani- 
mal had the raps, a common disease among 
them, for I heard a queer knocking noise in- 
side him. It is the sound of his joints, O 
Tambourgi ! (an Oriental term of reverence,) 
and proves him to be of the race of El Kei- 
rat. Ratrtat-tatr-too ! and I lost my dinner at 
the Prester's, embarking for a voyage to the 
Northwest Carry instead. Never use the 
word canoe, my dear Storg, if you wish to 
letain your self-respect. Birch is the term 
among us backwoodsmen. I never knew it 
till yesterday ; but, like a true philosopher, I 
made it appear as if I had been intimate with 
It from childhood. The rapidity with which 
the human mind levels i" self to the standard 
around it gives us the most pertinent warning 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 125 

us to the company we keep. It is as hard 
for most characters to stay at their own aver- 
age point in all companies, as for a thermome- 
ter to say 65° for twenty-four hours together. 
I like this in our friend Johannes Taurus, that 
he carries everywhere and maintains his insu- 
lar temperature, and will have everything 
accommodate itself to that. Shall I confess 
that this morning I would rather have broken 
the moral law, than have endangered the equi- 
poise of the birch by my awkwardness ? that 
I should have been prouder of a compliment 
to my paddling, than to have had both my 
guides suppose me the author of Hamlet ? 
Well, Cardinal Richelieu used to jump over 
chairs. 

We were to paddle about twenty miles , 
but we made it rather more by crossing and 
recrossing the lake. Twice we landed, — 
once at a camp, where we found the cook 
alone, baking bread and gingerbread. Mon- 
sieur Soyer would have been startled a little 
by this shaggy professor, — this Pi e-Raphael 



126 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

ite of cookery. He represented the saJoeratm 
period of the art, and his bread was of a bril- 
liant yellow, like those cakes tinged with saf- 
fron, which hold out so long against time and 
the flies in little water-side shops of seaport 
towns, — dingy extremities of trade fit to moul- 
der on Lethe wharf. His water was better, 
squeezed out of ice-cold granite in the neigh- 
boring mountains, and sent through subter- 
ranean ducts to sparkle up by the door of 
the camp. 

" There 's nothin' so sweet an' hulsome 
as your real spring water," said Uncle Zeb, 
" git it pure. But it 's dreffle hard to git 
it that ain't got sunthin' the matter of it. 
Snow-water '11 burn a man's inside out, — I 
larned that to the 'Roostick war, — and the 
snow lays terrible long on some o' thes'ere 
hills. Me an' Eb Stiles was up old Ktahdn 
once jest about this time o' year, an' we come 
aorost a kind o' holler like, as full o' snow as 
your stockin 's full o' your foot. / see it 
fust, an' took an' rammed a settin'-pole 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 127 

wahl, it was all o' twenty foot into % an* 
could n't fin' no bottom. I dunno as there 's 
snow-water enough in this to do no hurt. I 
don't somehow seem to think that real spring- 
water 's so plenty as it used to be." And 
Uncle Zeb, with perhaps a little over-refine- 
ment of scrupulosity, applied his lips to the 
Ethiop ones of a bottle of raw gin, with a kiss 
that drew out its very soul, — a hasia that 
Secundus might have sung. He must have 
been a wonderful judge of water, for he ana- 
lyzed this, and detected its latent snow simply 
by his eye, and without the clumsy process 
of tasting. I could not help thinking that 
he had made the desert his dwelling-place 
chiefly in order to enjoy the ministrations of 
this one fair spirit unmolested. 

We pushed on. Little islands loomed trem- 
bling between sky and water, like hanging 
gardens. Gradually the filmy trees defined 
themselves, the aeriaJ enchantment lost its 
potency, and we came up with common prose 
"islands that had 30 late been magical and po» 



128 A MOOSEUEAD JOURNAL. 

etic. The old story of the attained and un- 
attained. About noon we reached the head 
of the lake, and took possession of a deserted 
wongen, in which to cook and eat our dinner. 
No Jew, I am sure, can have a more thorough 
dislike of salt pork than I have in a normal 
state, yet I had already eaten it raw with 
hard bread for lunch, and relished it keenly. 
We soon had our tea-kettle over the fire, and 
before long the cover was chattering with the 
escaping steam, which had thus vainly begged 
of all men to be saddled and bridled, till 
James Watt one day happened to overhear 
it. One of our guides shot three Canada 
grouse, and these were turned slowly between 
"he fire and a bit of salt pork, which dropped 
latness upon them as it fried. Although my 
Hngers were certainly not made before knives 
and forks, yet they served as a convenient 
substitute for those more ancient inventions. 
We sat round, Turk-fashion, and ate thank- 
fully, while a party of aborigines of the Mos- 
quito tribe, who had camped in the woihgen 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 129 

before we arrived, dined upon us. I do not 
know what the British Protectorate of the 
Mosquitoes amounts to ; but, as I squatted 
there at the mercy of these blood-thirsty sav- 
ages, I no longer wondered that the classic 
Everett had been stung into a willingness for 
war on the question. 

" This 'ere 'd be about a complete place for 
a camp, ef there was on'y a spring o' sweet 
water handy. Frizzled pork goes wal, don't 
it ? Yes, an' sets wal, too," said Uncle Zeb, 
and he again tilted his bottle, which rose 
nearer and nearer to an angle of forty-five at 
every gurgle. He then broached a curious 
dietetic theory : " The reason we take salt 
pork along is cos it packs handy : you git the 
greatest amount o' board in the smallest com- 
pass, — let alone that it 's more nourishin' 
than an'thin' else. It kind o' don't disgest 
bo quick, but stays by ye, anourishin' ye all 
the while. 

" A feller can live wal on frizzled pork an T 
good spring-water, git it good. To the 'Roos- 

6* I 



130 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

tick war we did n't ask for nothin' better, — 
on'y beans." (Tilt, tilt, gurgle, gurgle.) 
Then, with an apparent feeling of inconsist- 
ency, " But then, come to git used to a par- 
ticular kind o' spring-water, an' it makes a 
feller hard to suit. Most all sorts o' water 
taste kind o' zVisipid away from home. Now, 
I 've gut a spring to my place that 's as sweet 
— wahl, it 's as sweet as maple sap. A feller 
acts about water jest as he does about a pair 
o' boots. It 's all on it in gittin' wonted. 
Now, them boots," &c, &c. (Ghirgle, gurgle, 
yurgle, smack!) 

All this while he was packing away the 
remains of the pork and hard bread in two 
large firkins. This accomplished, we re- 
embarked, our uncle on his way to the birch 
essaying a kind of song in four or five parts, 
of which the words were hilarious and the 
tune profoundly melancholy, and which was 
finished, and the rest of his voice apparently 
jerked out of him in one sharp falsetto note 
Dy his tripping over the root of a tree. We 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 131 

paddled a short distance up a brook which 
came, into the lake smoothly through a little 
meadow not far off. We soon reached the 
Northwest Carry, and our guide, pointing 
through the woods, said : " That 's the Can- 
nydy road. You can travel that clearn to 
Kebeck, a hunderd an' twenty mile," — a 
privilege of which I respectfully declined to 
avail myself. The offer, however, remains 
open to the public. The Carry is called two 
miles ; but this is the estimate of somebody 
who had nothing to lug. I had a headache 
and all my baggage, which, with a traveller's 
instinct, I had brought with me. (P. S. — 
I did not even take the keys out of my pocket, 
and both my bags were wet through before 
I came back.) My estimate of the distance 
is eighteen thousand six hundred and seventy- 
four miles and three quarters, — the fraction 
being the part left to be travelled after one 
of my companions most kindly insisted on 
relieving me of my heaviest bag. I know 
very well that the ancieni Roman soldiers 



1.32 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

ased to carry sixty pounds' weight, and all 
that ; but I am not, and never shall be, an 
ancient Roman soldier, — no, not even in the 
miraculous Thundering Legion. Uncle Zeb 
slung the two provender firkins across his 
shoulder, and trudged along, grumbling that 
" he never see sech a contrairy pair as them." 
He had begun upon a second bottle of his 
"particular kind o' spring-water," and, at 
every rest, the gurgle of this peripatetic foun- 
tain might be heard, followed by a smack, a 
fragment of mosaic song, or a confused clatter 
with the cowhide boots, being an arbitrary 
symbol, intended to represent the festive 
dance. Christian's pack gave him not half 
so much trouble as the firkins gave Uncle 
Zeb. It grew harder and harder to sling 
them, and with every fresh gulp of the Bata- 
vian elixir, they got heavier. Or rather, the 
truth was, that his hat grew heavier, in which 
he was carrying on an extensive manufac- 
ture of bricks without straw. At last affairs 
reached a crisis, and a particularly favorable 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 133 

pitch offering, with a puddle at the foot of \t s 
even the boots afforded no sufficient ballast, 
and away went our uncle, the satellite firkins 
accompanying faithfully his headlong flight. 
Did ever exiled monarch or disgraced minis- 
ter find the cause of his fall in himself? Is 
there not always a strawberry at the bottom 
of our cup of life, on which we can lay all 
the blame of our deviations from the straight 
path ? Till now Uncle Zeb had contrived to 
give a gloss of volition to smaller stumblings 
and gyrations, by exaggerating them into an 
appearance of playful burlesque. But the 
present case was beyond any such subterfuges. 
He held a bed of justice where he sat, and 
then arose slowly, with a stern determination 
of vengeance stiffening every muscle of his 
face. But what would he select as the cul- 
prit ? " It 's that cussed firkin,'' he mumbled 
to himself. " I never knowed a firkin cair 
on so, — no, not in the 'Roostehicick war. 
There, go long, will ye ? and don't come back 
till you Ve larned how to walk with a gen el- 



134 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

man ! " And, seizing the jnhappy scapegoat 
by the bail, he hurled it into the forest. It 
is a curious circumstance, that it was not the 
firkin containing the bottle which was thus 
condemned to exile. 

The end of the Carry was reached at last, 
and, as we drew near it, we heard a sound of 
shouting and laughter. It came from a par- 
ty of men making hay of the wild grass in 
Seboomok meadows, which he around Seboo- 
mok pond, into which the Carry empties it- 
self. Their camp was near, and our two 
hunters set out for it, leaving us seated in 
the birch on the plashy border of the pond. 
The repose was perfect. Another heaven 
hallowed and deepened the polished lake, and 
through that nether world the fish-hawk's 
double floated with balanced wings, or, wheel- 
ing suddenly, flashed .his whitened breast 
against the sun. As the clattering kingfisher 
flew unsteadily across, and seemed to push 
his heavy head along with ever-renewing ef- 
fort, a visionary mate flitted from downwarq 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 135 

tree to tree below. Some tall alders shaded 
us from the sun, in whose yellow afternoon 
light the drowsy forest was steeped, giving 
out that wholesome resinous perfume, almost 
the only warm odor which it is refreshing to 
breathe. The tame hay-cocks in the midst 
of the wildness gave one a pleasant reminis- 
cence of home, like hearing one's native tongue 
in a strange country. 

Presently our hunters came back, bringing 
with them a tall, thin, active-looking man, 
with black eyes, that glanced unconsciously 
on all sides, like one of those spots of sunlight 
which a child dances up and down the street 
with a bit of looking-glass. This was M., the 
captain of the hay-makers, a famous river- 
driver, and who was to have fifty men under 
him next winter. I could now understand 
that sleepless vigilance of eye. He had con- 
sented to take two of our party in his birch 
to search for moose. A quick, nervous, de- 
cided man, he got them into the birch, and 
was off instantly, without a superfluous word. 



136 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

He evidently looked upon them as he would 
upon a couple of logs which he was to deliver 
at a certain place. Indeed, I doubt if life 
and the world presented themselves to Napier 
himself in a more logarithmic way. His only 
thought was to do the immediate duty well, 
and to pilot his particular raft down the 
crooked stream of life to the ocean beyond. 
The birch seemed to feel him as an inspiring 
soul, and slid away straight and swift for the 
outlet of the pond. As he disappeared under 
the over-arching alders of the brook, our two 
hunters could not repress a grave and meas- 
ured applause. There is never any extrava- 
gance among these woodmen ; their eye, ac- 
customed to reckoning the number of feet 
which a tree will scale, is rapid and close in 
its guess of the amount of stuff in a man. It 
was laudari a laudato, however, for they them- 
selves were accounted good men in a birch. 
I was amused, in talking with them about 
him, to meet with an instance of that ten- 
dency of the human mind to assign some 



A M00SE1IEAD JOURNAL. 137 

atlerly improbable reason for gifts which seem 
unaccountable. After due praise, one of them 
said, " I guess he 's got some Injun in him," 
although I knew very well that the speaker 
had a thorough contempt for the red-man, 
mentally and physically. Here was mythol- 
ogy in a small way, — the same that under 
more favorable auspices hatched Helen out 
of an egg and gave Merlin an Incubus for 
a father. I was pleased with all I saw of 
M. He was in his narrow sphere a true ava% 
avSpcov, and the ragged edges of his old hat 
seemed to become coronated as I looked at 
him. He impressed me as a man really edu- 
cated, — that is, with his aptitudes drawn out 
and ready for use. He was A. M. and LL. D. 
in Woods College, — Axe-master and Doc- 
tor of Logs. Are not our educations com- 
monly like a pile of books laid over a plant 
in a pot ? The compressed nature struggles 
through at every crevice, but can never get 
the cramp and stunt out of it. We spend 
all our youth in Duilding a vessel for our voy- 



138 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

age of life, and set forth with streamers fly- 
ing ; but the moment we come nigh the great 
loadstone mountain of our proper destiny, out 
leap all our carefully-driven bolts and nails, 
and we get many a mouthful of good salt 
brine, and many a buffet of the rough water 
of experience, before we secure the bare right 
to live. 

We now entered the outlet, a long-drawn 
aisle of alder, on each side of which spired tall 
firs, spruces, and white cedars. The motion 
of the birch reminded me of the gondola, and 
they represent among water-craft the fe- 
lidce, the cat tribe, stealthy, silent, treacher- 
ous, and preying by night. T closed my eyes, 
and strove to fancy myself in the dumb city, 
whose only horses are the bronze ones of St. 
Mark. But Nature would allow no rival, and 
bent down an alder-bough to brush my cheek 
and recall me. Only the robin sings in the 
emerald chambers of these tall sylvan palaces, 
tnd the squirrel leaps from hanging balcony 
to balcony. 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 139 

The rain which the loons foreboded had 
raised the west branch of the Penobscot so 
much, that a strong current was setting back 
into the pond ; and, when at last we brushed 
through into the river, it was full to the brim, 
— too full for moose, the hunters said. Rivers 
with low banks have always the compensa- 
tion of giving a sense of entire fulness. The 
sun sank behind its horizon of pines, whose 
pointed summits notched the rosy west in an 
endless black sierra. At the same moment 
the golden moon swung slowly up in the east, 
like the other scale of that Homeric balance 
in which Zeus weighed the deeds of men. 
Sunset and moonrise at once ! Adam had no 
more in Eden — except the head of Eve upon 
his shoulder. The stream was so smooth, that 
the floating logs we met seemed to hang in a 
glowing atmosphere, the shadow-half being as 
real as the solid. And gradually the mind 
was etherized to a like dreamy placidity, till 
fact and fancy, the substance and the image, 
floating on the current of reverie, became tut 



140 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

is the upper and under halves of one unreal 
reality. 

In the west still lingered a pale-green light. 
I do not know whether it be from greater 
familiarity, bat it always seems to me that 
the pinnacles of pine-trees make an edge to 
the landscape which tells better against the 
twilight, or the fainter dawn before the rising 
moon, than the rounded and cloud-cumulus 
outline of hard-wood trees. 

After paddling a couple of miles, we found 
the arbored mouth of the little Malaho-odus 
River, famous for moose. We had been on 
the look-out for it, and I was amused to hear 
one of the hunters say to the other, to assure 
himself of his familiarity with the spot, " You 
drove the West Branch last spring, did n't 
tou ? " as one of us might ask about a horse. 
We did not explore the Malahoodus far, but 
left the other birch to thread its cedared soli- 
tudes, while we turned back to try our for- 
Lunes in the larger stream. We paddled on 
about four miles farther, lingering now and 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL 141 

then opposite the black mouth of a moose- 
path. The incidents of our voyage were few, 
but quite as exciting and profitable as the 
items of the newspapers. A stray log com- 
pensated very well for the ordinary run of 
accidents, and the floating carJciss of a moose 
which we met could pass muster instead of a 
singular discovery of human remains by work- 
men in digging a cellar. Once or twice we 
saw what seemed ghosts of trees ; but they 
turned out to be dead cedars, in winding- 
sheets of long gray moss, made spectral by 
the moonlight. Just as we were turning to 
drift back down-stream, we heard a loud 
gnawing sound close by us on the bank. One 
of our guides thought it a hedgehog, the other 
a bear. I inclined to the bear, as making the 
adventure more imposing. A rifle was fired 
at the sound, which began again with the most 
provoking indifference, ere the echo, flaring 
madly at first from shore to shore, died far 
away in a hoarse sigh. 

Half past Eleven, p. m. — No sign of a 



142 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

moose yet. The birch, it seems, was strained 
at the Cany, or the pitch was softened as 
she lay on the shore during dinner, and she 
leaks a little. If there be any virtue in the 
sitzbad, I shall discover it. If I cannot ex- 
tract green cucumbers from the moon's rays, 
I get something quite as cool. One of the 
guides shivers so as to shake the birch. 

Quarter to Twelve. — Later from the Freshet! 
— The water in the birch is about three inches 
deep, but the dampness reaches already nearly 
to the waist. I am obliged to remove the 
matches from the ground-floor of my trou- 
sers into the upper story of a breast-pocket. 
Meanwhile, w r e are to sit immovable, — for 
fear of frightening the moose, — which induces 
cramps. 

Half past Twelve. — A crashing is heard on 
the left bank. This is a moose in good ear- 
nest. We are besought to hold our breaths, 
if possible. My fingers so numb, I could not, 
if I tried. Crash! crash! again, and then a 
plunge, followed by dead stillness. " Swim- 






A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL. 143 

min' crik," whispers guide, suppressing all 
unnecessary parts of speech, — " don't stir." 
I, for one, am not likely to. A cold fog which 
has been gathering for the last hour has fin- 
ished me. I fancy myself one of those naked 
pigs that seem rushing out of market-doors in 
winter, frozen in a ghastly attitude of gallop. 
If I were to be shot myself, I should feel no 
interest in it. As it is, I am only a spectator, 
having declined a gun. Splash ! again ; this 
time the moose is in sight, and click! click! 
one rifle misses fire after the other. The fog 
has quietly spiked our batteries. The moose 
goes crashing up the bank, and presently we 
can hear it chewing its cud close by. So we 
iie in wait, freezing. 

At one o'clock, I propose to land at a de- 
serted wongen I had noticed on the way up, 
where I will make a fire, and leave them to 
refrigerate as much longer as they please. 
Axe in hand, I go plunging tnrough waist- 
deep weeds dripping with dew, haunted by an 
intense conviction that the gnawing sound we 



[44 -4 MOOSE 11 HAD JOURNAL. 

had heard ivas a bear, and a bear at least eigh- 
teen hands high. There is something poker- 
ish about a deserted dwelling, even in broad 
daylight; but here in the obscure wood, and 
the moon filtering unwillingly through the 
trees ! Well, I made the door at last, and 
found the place packed fuller with darkness 
than it ever had been with hay. Gradually 
I was able to make things out a little, and 
began to hack frozenly at a log which I 
groped out. I was relieved presently by one 
of the guides. He cut at once into one 
of the uprights of the building till he got 
some dry splinters, and we soon had a fire 
like the burning of a whole wood-wharf in 
our part of the country. My companion 
went back to the birch, and left me to 
keep house. First I knocked a hole in the 
roof (which the fire began to lick in a rei- 
gning way) for a chimney, and then cleared 
Away a damp growth of " pison-elder," to 
make a sleeping place. When the unsuccess- 
ful hunters returned, I had everything quite 



A MOOSE HEAD JOURNAL. 145 

comfortable, and was steaming at the rate of 
about ten horse-power a minute. Young Te- 
lemachus was sorry to give up the moose so 
Boon, and, with the teeth chattering almost 
out of his head, he declared that he would 
like to stick it out all night. However, he 
reconciled himself to the fire, and, making 
our beds of some " splits " which we poked 
from the roof, we lay down at half past two. 
I, who have inherited a habit of looking into 
every closet before I go to bed, for fear of 
fire, had become in two days such a stoic of 
the woods, that I went to sleep tranquilly, 
certain that my bedroom would be in a blaze 
before morning. And so, indeed, it was ; and 
the withes that bound it together being burned 
off, one of the sides fell in without waking 
me. 

Tuesday, 16th. — After a sleep of two hours 
iind a half, so sound that it was as good as 
tight, we started at half past four for the hay- 
makers' camp again. We found them just 
getting breakfast. We sat down upon the 



146 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

ieacon-seat before the fire blazing between 
the bedroom and the salle d manger, which 
were simply two roofs of spruce-bark, sloping 
to the ground on one side, the other three 
being left open. We found that we had, at 
least, been luckier than the other party, for 
M. had brought back his convoy without even 
seeing a moose. As there was not room at 
the table for all of us to breakfast together, 
these hospitable woodmen forced us to sit 
down first, although w T e resisted stoutly. Our 
breakfast consisted of fresh bread, fried salt 
pork, stewed whortleberries, and tea. Our 
kind hosts refused to take money for it, nor 
would M. accept anything for his trouble. 
This seemed even more open-handed when I 
remembered that they had brought all their 
stores over the Carry upon their shoulders, 
paying an ache extra for every pound. If 
'•heir hospitality lacked anything of hard ex 
ternal polish, it had all the deeper grace which 
springs only from sincere manliness. I have 
rarely sat at a table d'hote wh ; ch might no? 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 147 

nave taken a lesson from them in essentia] 
courtesy. I have never seen a finer race of 
men. They have all the virtues of the sailor, 
without that unsteady roll in the gait with 
which the ocean proclaims itself quite as much 
in the moral as in the physical habit of a man. 
They appeared to me to have hewn out a 
short northwest passage through wintry woods 
to those spice-lands of character which we 
dwellers in cities must reach, if at all, by weary 
voyages in the monotonous track of the trades. 

By the way, as we were embirching last 
evening for our moose-chase, I asked what I 
was to do with my baggage. " Leave it here," 
said our guide, and he laid the bags upon a 
platform of alders, which he bent down to 
keep them beyond reach of the rising water. 

" Will they be safe here ? " 

" As safe as they would be locked up in 
your house at home." 

And so I found them at my return ; only 
the hay-makers had carried them to their 
camp for greater security against the chances 
tf the weather. 



148 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

We got back to Kinco in time for dinner ; 
and in the afternoon, the weather being fine, 
went up the mountain. As we landed at the 
foot, our guide pointed to the remains of a 
red shirt and a pair of blanket trousers. 
fc4 That," said he, " is the reason there 's such 
a trade in ready-made clo'es. A suit gits 
pooty well w^ore out by the time a camp 
breaks up in the spring, and the lumberers 
want to look about right when they come back 
into the settlements, so they buy somethin' 
ready-made, and heave ole bust-up into the 
bush." True enough, thought I, this is the 
Ready-made Age. It is quicker being cov- 
ered than fitted. So we all go to the slop- 
shop and come out uniformed, every mother's 
son with habits of thinking and doing cut on 
one pattern, with no special reference to his 
peculiar build. 

Kineo rises 1750 feet above the sea, and 
1 50 above the lake. The climb is ^very easy, 
with fine outlooks at every turn over lake 
ind forest. Near the top is a spring of water, 



A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 149 

which even Uncle Zeb might have allowed 
fco be wholesome. The little tin clipper was 
scratched all over with names, showing that 
vanity, at least, is not put out of "breath by the 
ascent. O Ozymandias, King of kings ! We 
are all scrawling on something of the kind, 
" My name is engraved on the institutions of 
my country," thinks the statesman. But, 
alas ! institutions are as changeable as tin-dip- 
pers ; men are content to drink the same old 
water, if the shape of the cup only be new, 
and our friend gets two lines in the Biograph- 
ical Dictionaries. After all, these inscrip- 
tions, which make us smile up here, are about 
as valuable as the Assyrian ones which Hincks 
and Rawlinson read at cross-purposes. Have 
we not Smiths and Browns enough, that we 
must ransack the ruins of Nimroud for more ? 
Near the spring we met a Bloomer ! It was 
the first chronic one I had ever seen. It 
struck me as a sensible costume for the occa- 
sion, and it will be the onlv wear in the Greek 
Kalends, when women believe that sense is an 
equivalent for grace. 



150 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

The forest primeval is best seen from the 
top of a mountain. It then impresses ore 
by its extent, like an Oriental epic. To be 
in it is nothing, for then an acre is as good 
as a thousand square miles. You cannot see 
five rods in any direction, and the ferns, 
mosses, and tree-trunks just around you are 
the best of it. As for solitude, night will 
make a better one with ten feet square of 
pitch dark ; and mere size is hardly an ele- 
ment of grandeur, except in works of man, — 
as the Colosseum. It is through one or the 
other pole of vanity that men feel the sublime 
in mountains. It is either, How small great 
I am beside it ! or, Big as you are, little I's 
soul will hold a dozen of you. The true idea 
of a forest is not a selva selvaggia, but some- 
thing humanized a little, as we imagine the 
forest of Arden, with trees standing at royal 
intervals, — a commonwealth, and not a com- 
munism. To some moods, it is congenial te 
ook over endless leagues of unbroken sav 
igery without a hint of man. 



A MOOSE HE AD JOURNAL. Ul 

Wednesday. — This morning fished. Tele- 
machus caught a laker of thirteen pounds and 
a half, and I an overgrown cusk, which we 
threw away, but which I found afterwards 
Agassiz would have been glad of, for all is 
fish that comes to his net, from the fossil 
down. The fish, when caught, are straight- 
way knocked on the head. A lad who went 
with us seeming to show an over-zeal in this 
operation, we remonstrated. But he gave a 
good, human reason for it, — " He no need 
to ha' gone and been a fish if he did n't like 
it," — an excuse which superior strength or 
cunning has always found sufficient. It was 
some comfort, in this case, to think that St. 
Jerome believed in a limitation of God's provi- 
dence, and that it did not extend to inanimate 
things or creatures devoid of reason. 

Thus, my dear Storg, I have finished my 
Oriental adventures, and somewhat, it must 
be owned, in the diffuse Oriental manner. 
There is very little about Moosehead Lake 
jn it, and not even the Latin name for moose 



L52 A MOOSEHEAD JOURNAL. 

which I might have obtained by sufficient re- 
search. If I had killed one, I would have 
given you his name in that dead language. I 
did not profess to give you an account of the 
lake ; but a journal, and, moreover, my jour- 
nal, with a little nature, a little human nature, 
and a great deal of I in it, which last ingre- 
dient I take to be the true spirit of this spe- 
cies of writing ; all the rest beino; so much 
water for tender throats which cannot take 
it neat. 



Leaves 



FROM 



My Journal in Italy 

AND ELSEWHERE. 



** 



AT SEA. 

THE sea was meant to be looked at from 
shore, as mountains are from the plain. 
Lucretius made this discovery long ago, and 
was blunt enough to blurt it forth, romance 
and sentiment — in other words, the pretence 
of feeling what we do not feel — being inven- 
tions of a later day. To be sure, Cicero used 
to twaddle about Greek literature and philoso- 
phy, much as people do about ancient art now- 
a-days ; but I rather sympathize with those 
stout old Romans who despised both, and be- 
lieved that to found an empire was as grand 
an achievement as to build an epic or to carve 
a statue. But though there might have been 
twaddle, (as why not, since there was a Sen- 
ate ?) I rather think Petrarch was the first 
choragus of that sentimental dance which so 



156 AT SEA. 

long led young folks away from the realities of 
life like the piper of Hamelin, and whose suc- 
cession ended, let us hope, with Chateaubriand. 
But for them, Byron, whose real strength lay 
in his sincerity, would never have talked about 
the " sea bounding beneath him like a steed 
that knows his rider," and all that sort of 
thing. Even if it had been true, steam has 
been as fatal to that part of the romance of 
the sea as to hand-loom weaving. But what 
say you to a twelve days' calm such as we 
dozed through in mid-Atlantic and in mid- 
August ? I know nothing so tedious at once 
and exasperating as that regular slap of the 
wilted sails when the ship rises and falls with 
the slow breathing of the sleeping sea, one 
greasy, brassy sw r ell following another, slow, 
smooth, immitigable as the series of Words- 
worth's " Ecclesiastical Sonnets." Even at 
his best, Neptune, in a tete-a-tete, has a way 
of repeating himself, an obtuseness to the ne 
quid nimis, that is stupefying. It reminds me 
of organ-music and my good friend Sebastian 



AT SEA. 157 

Bach. A fugue or two will do very well ; but 
a cone ert made up of nothing else is altogether 
too epic for me. There is nothing so desper- 
ately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer 
wonder at the cruelty of pirates. Fancy an 
existence in which the coming up of a clumsy 
finback whale, who says Pooh ! to you sol- 
emnly as you lean over the tafFrail, is an event 
as exciting as an election on shore ! The 
dampness seems to strike into the wits as into 
the lucifer-matches, so that one may scratch 
a thought half a dozen times and get nothing 
at last but a faint sputter, the forlorn hope of 
fire, which only goes far enough to leave a 
sense of suffocation behind it. Even smoking 
becomes an employment instead of a solace. 
Who less likely to come to their wit's end than 
W. M. T. and A. H. C. ? Yet I have seen 
them driven to five meals a day for mental oc- 
cupation. I sometimes sit and pity Noah ; but 
even he had this advantage over all succeed- 
ing navigators, that, wherever he landed, he 
Jvas sure to get no ill news from home. He 



158 AT SEA. 

should be canonized as the patron-saint of 
newspaper correspondents, being the only man 
who ever had the very last authentic intelli- 
gence from everywhere. 

The finback whale recorded just above has 
much the look of a brown-paper parcel, — the 
whitish stripes that run across him answering 
for the pack-thread. He has a kind of acci- 
dental hole in the top of his head, through 
which he pooh-poohs the rest of creation, and 
which looks as if it had been made by the 
chance thrust of a chestnut rail. He was our 
first event. Our second was harpooning a 
sunfish, which basked dozing on the lap of the 
sea, looking so much like the giant turtle of 
an alderman's dream, that I am persuaded 
he would have made mock-turtle soup rather 
than acknowledge his imposture. But he 
broke away just as they were hauling him 
over the side, and sank placidly through the 
clear water, leaving behind him a crimson trail 
that wavered a moment and was gone. 

The sea, though, has better sights than these. 



AT SEA. 159 

When we were up with the Azores, we be- 
gan to meet flying-fish and Portuguese men- 
of-war beautiful as the galley of Cleopatra, tiny 
craft that dared these seas before Columbus. I 
have seen one of the former rise from the crest 
of a wave, and, glancing from another some 
two hundred feet beyond, take a fresh flight 
of perhaps as long. How Calderon would 
have similized this pretty creature had he ever 
seen it ! How would he have run him up and 
down the gamut of simile ! If a fish, then a 
fish with wings ; if a bird, then a bird with 
fins ; and so on, keeping up the poor shuttle- 
cock of a conceit as is his wont. Indeed, the 
poor thing is the most killing bait for a com- 
parison, and I assure you I have three or four 
in my inkstand ; — but be calm, they shall stay 
there. Moore, who looked on all nature as a 
kind of Grradus ad Parnassum, a thesaurus of 
similitude, and spent his life in a game of 
What is my thought like? with himself, did 
the flying-fish on his way to Bermuda. So 1 
leave him in peace. 



160 AT SEA. 

The most beautiful thing I have seen at sea, 
all the more so that I had never heard of it, 
is the trail of a shoal of fish through the phos- 
phorescent water. It is like a flight of silver 
rockets, or the streaming of northern lights 
through that silent nether heaven. I thought 
nothing could go beyond that rustling star- 
foam which was churned up by our ship's 
bows, or those eddies and disks of dreamy 
flame that rose and wandered out of sight 
behind us. 

'T was fire our ship was plunging through, 
Cold fire that o'er the quarter flew ; 
And wandering moons of idle flame 
Grew full and waned, and went and came, 
Dappling with light the huge sea-snake 
That slid behind us in the wake. 

But there was something even more deli- 
cately rare in the apparition of the fish, as 
they turned up in gleaming furrows the la- 
tent moonshine which the ocean seemed to 
have hoarded against these vacant interlunar 
nights. In the Mediterranean one day, as 



AT SEA. 161 

we were lying becalmed, I observed the wa- 
ter freckled with dingy specks, which at last 
gathered to a pinkish scum on the surface. 
The sea had been so phosphorescent for some 
nights, that when the Captain gave me my 
bath, by dousing me with buckets from the 
house on deck, the spray flew off my head and 
shoulders in sparks. It occurred to me that 
this dirty-looking scum might be the luminous 
matter, and I had a pailful dipped up to keep 
till after dark. When I went to look at it after 
nightfall, it seemed at first perfectly dead ; but 
when I shook it, the whole broke out into what 
I can only liken to milky flames, whose lam- 
bent silence was strangely beautiful, and star- 
tled me almost as actual projection might an 
alchemist. I could not bear to be the death 
of so much beauty ; so I poured it all over- 
board again. 

Another sight worth taking a voyage for is 
that of the sails by moonlight. Our course 
was " south and by east, half south," so tha*, 
we seemed bound for the full moon as she 



162 AT SEA. 

rolled up over our wavering horizon. Then 
I used to go forward to the bowsprit and look 
back. Our ship was a clipper, with every rag 
set, stunsails, sky-scrapers, and all ; nor was 
it easy to believe that such a wonder could 
be built of canvas as that white many-storied 
pile of cloud that stooped over me, or drew 
back as we rose and fell with the waves. 

These are all the wonders I can recall of 
my five weeks at sea, except the sun. Were 
you ever alone with the sun ? You think it 
a very simple question ; but I never was, in 
the full sense of the word, till I was held up 
to him one cloudless day on the broad buckler 
of the ocean. I suppose one might have the 
same feeling in the desert. I remember get- 
ting something like it years ago, when I 
climbed alone to the top of a mountain, and 
lay face up on the hot gray moss, striving to 
get a notion of how an Arab might feel. It 
was my American commentary of the Koran, 
and not a bad on<\ In a New England win- 
ter, too, when everything is gagged with snow 



as if some gigantic physical geographer were 
taking a cast of the earth's face in plaster, the 
bare knob of a hill will introduce you to the 
sun as a comparative stranger. But at sea 
you may be alone with him day after day, and 
almost all day long. I never understood be- 
fore that nothing short of full daylight can give 
the supremest sense of solitude. Darkness 
will not do so, for the imagination peoples it 
with more shapes than ever were poured from 
the frozen loins of the populous North. The 
sun, I sometimes think, is a little grouty at 
sea, especially at high noon, feeling that he 
wastes his beams on those fruitless furrows. 
It is otherwise with the moon. She " com- 
forts the night," as Chapman finely says, and 
I always found her a companionable creature. 
In the ocean-horizon I took untiring delight. 
It is the true magic-circle of expectation and 
conjecture, — almost as good as a wishing- 
ring. What will rise over that edge we sail 
toward daily and never overtake ? A sail ? 
tn island ? the new shore of the Old World , 



164 AT SEA. 

Something rose every day, which I need not 
have gone so far to see, but at whose levee I 
was a much more faithful courtier than on 
shore. A cloudless sunrise in mid-ocean is 
beyond comparison for simple grandeur. It is 
like Dante's style, bare and perfect. Naked 
sun meets naked sea, the true classic of nature. 
There may be more sentiment in morning on 
shore, — the shivering fairy-jewelry of dew, 
the silver point-lace of sparkling hoar-frost, — 
but there is also more complexity, more of 
the romantic. The one savors of the elder 
Edda, the other of the Minnesingers. 

And I thus floating, lonely elf, 

A kind of planet by myself, 

The mists draw up and furl away, 

And in the east a warming gray, 

Faint as the tint of oaken woods 

When o'er their buds May breathes and broods, 

Tells tnat the golden sunrise-tide 

Is lapsing up earth's thirsty side, 

Each moment purpling on the crest 

Of some stark billow farther west : 

And as the sea-moss droops and hears 

The gurgling flood that nears and nears, 



AT SEA. 165 

Aud then with tremulous content 

Floats out each thankful filament, 

So waited I until it came, 

God's daily miracle, — O shame 

That I had seen so many days 

Unthankful, without wondering praise, 

Not recking more this bliss of earth 

Than the cheap fire that lights my hearth ! 

But now glad thoughts and holy pour 

Into my heart, as once a year 

To San Miniato's open door, 

In long procession, chanting clear, 

Through slopes of sun, through shadows hoar, 

The coupled monks slow-climbing sing, 

And like a golden censer swing 

From rear to front, from front to rear 

Their alternating bursts of praise, 

Till the roof's fading seraphs gaze 

Down through an odorous mist, that crawls 

Lingeringly up the darkened walls, 

And the dim arches, silent long, 

Are startled with triumphant song. 

I wrote yesterday that the sea still rimmed 
our prosy lives with mystery and conjecture. 
But one is shut up on shipboard like Mon- 
taigne in his tower, with nothing to do but 
to review his own thoughts and contradict 



166 AT SEA. 

himself. Dire, redire, et me contredire, will be 
the staple of my journal till I see land. I say 
nothing of such matters as the montagna bruna 
on which Ulysses wrecked ; but since the six- 
teenth century could any man reasonably hope 
to stumble on one of those wonders which 
were cheap as dirt in the days of St. Saga ? 
Faustus, Don Juan, and Tanhaiiser are the 
last ghosts of legend, that lingered almost till 
the Gallic cock-crow of universal enlighten- 
ment and disillusion. The Public School has 
done for Imagination. What shall I see in 
Outre-Mer, or on the way thither, but what 
can be seen with eyes ? To be sure, I stick 
by the sea-serpent, and would fain believe that 
science has scotched, not killed, him. Nor is 
he to be lightly given up, for, like the old 
Scandinavian snake, he binds together for us 
the two hemispheres of Past and Present, 
of Belief and Science. He is the link which 
knits us seaboard Yankees with our Norse 
progenitors, interpreting between the age of 
the dragon and that of the railroad -train 



AT SEA. 167 

We have made ducks and drakes of that 
large estate of wonder and delight bequeathed 
to us by ancestral vikings, and this alone re- 
mains to us unthrift heirs of Linn. 

I feel an undefined respect for a man who 
has seen the sea-serpent. He is to his brother- 
fishers what the poet is to his fellow-men. 
Where they have seen nothing better than a 
school of horse-mackerel, or the idle coils of 
ocean around Half-way Rock, he has caught 
authentic glimpses of the withdrawing mantle- 
hem of the Edda age. I care not for the 
Aionster himself. It is not the thing, but the 
belief in the thing, that is dear to me. May 
it be long before Professor Owen is comforted 
with the sight of his unfleshed vertebrae, long 
before they stretch many a rood behind Kim- 
ball's or Barnum's glass, reflected in the shal- 
low orbs of Mr. and Mrs. Public, which stare, 
but see not ! When we read that Captain 
Spalding, of the pink-stern Three Potties, has 
oeheld him rushing through the brine like an 
infinite series of bewitched mackerel-casks, we 



168 AT SEA. 

feel that the mystery of old Ocean, at least, 
has not yet been sounded, — that Faith and 
Awe survive there unevaporate. I once 
ventured the horse-mackerel theory to an old 
fisherman, browner than a tomcod. " Hos- 
mackril ! " he exclaimed indignantly, " hos- 
mackril be — " (here he used a phrase com- 
monly indicated in laical literature by the same 
sign which serves for Doctorate in Divinity,) 
" don't yer spose I know a hos-mackril ? " 
The intonation of that "J" would have si- 
lenced Professor Monkbarns Owen with his 
provoking phoca forever. What if one should 
ask him if he knew a trilobite ? 

The fault of modern travellers is, that they 
see nothing out of sight. They talk of eocene 
periods and tertiary formations, and tell us 
how the world looked to the plesiosaur. They 
take science (or nescience) with them, instead 
of that soul of generous trust their elders had. 
AH their senses are sceptics and doubters, 
materialists reporting things for other seep* 
tics to doubt still further upon. Nature be 



AT SEA. 169 

comes a reluctant witness upon the stand, 
badgered with geologist hammers and phials 
of acid. There have been no travellers since 
those included in Hakluyt and Purcbas, ex- 
cept Martin, perhaps, who saw an inch or two 
into the invisible at the Orkneys. We have 
peripatetic lecturers, but no more travellers. 
Travellers' stories are no longer proverbial. 
We have picked nearly every apple (wormy 
or otherwise) from the world's tree of knowl- 
edge, and that without an Eve to tempt us. 
Two or three have hitherto hung luckily be- 
yond reach on a lofty bough shadowing the 
interior of Africa, but there is a German Doc- 
tor at this very moment pelting at them with 
sticks and stones. It may be only next week, 
and these too, bitten by geographers and ge- 
ologists, will be thrown away. 

Analysis is carried into everything. Even 
Deity is subjected to chemic tests. We must 
have exact knowledge, a cabinet stuck full of 
bets pressed, dried, or preserved in spirits, 
instead of the large, vague world our fathers 



170 AT SEA. 

had. With them science was poetry ; with 
us, poetry is science. Our modern Eden is 
a tortus siccus. Tourists defraud rather than 
enrich us. They have not that sense of aes- 
thetic proportion which characterized the elder 
traveller. Earth is no longer the fine work 
of art it was, for nothing is left to the imagi- 
nation. Job Hortop, arrived at the height 
of the Bermudas, thinks it full time to indulge 
us in a merman. Nay, there is a story told 
by Webster, in his " Witchcraft," of a mer- 
man with a mitre, who, on being sent back to 
his watery diocese of finland, made what ad- 
vances he could toward an episcopal benedic- 
tion by bowing his head thrice. Doubtless 
he had been consecrated by St. Antony of 
Padua. A dumb bishop would be sometimes 
no unpleasant phenomenon, by the way. Sir 
John Hawkins is not satisfied with telling us 
about the merely sensual Canaries, but is gen- 
erous enough to throw us in a handful of 
" certain flitting islands " to boot. Henry 
Hawkes describes the visible Mexican cities 



AT SEA. 171 

Mid then is not so frugal but that he can give 
us a few invisible ones. Thus do these gen- 
erous ancient mariners make children of us 
again. Their successors show us an earth 
effete and past bearing, tracing out with the 
eyes of industrious fleas every wrinkle and 
crowfoot. 

The journals of the elder navigators are 
prose Odysseys. The geographies of our an- 
cestors were works of fancy and imagination. 
They read poems where we yawn over items. 
Their world was a huge wonder-horn, ex- 
haustless as that which Thor strove to drain. 
Ours would scarce quench the small thirst of 
a bee. No modern voyager brings back the 
magical foundation-stones of a Tempest. No 
Marco Polo, traversing the desert beyond the 
city of Lok, would tell of things able to inspire 
the mind of Milton with 

" Calling shapes and beckoning shadows dire, 
And airy tongues tha'. syllable men's names 
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses." 

It was easv enough to believe the story of 



172 AT SEA. 

Dante, when two thirds of even the upper- 
world were yet untraversed and unmapped. 
With every step of the recent traveller our 
inheritance of the wonderful is diminished. 
Those beautifully pictured notes of the Possi- 
ble are redeemed at a ruinous discount in the 
hard and cumbrous coin of the Actual. How 
are we not defrauded and impoverished? Does 
California vie with El Dorado ? or are Bruce's 
Abyssinian kings a set-off for Prester John ? 
A bird in the bush is worth two in the hand. 
And if the philosophers have not even yet 
been able to agree whether the world has any 
existence independent of ourselves, how do we 
not gain a loss in every addition to the cata- 
logue of Vulgar Errors ? Where are the 
fishes which nidificated in trees ? Where the 
monopodes sheltering themselves from the sun 
beneath their single umbrella-like foot, — um- 
brella-like in everything but the fatal neces- 
sity of being borrowed ? Where the Acephali, 
with whom Herodotus, in a kind of ecstasy 
wound up his climax of men with abnormal 



AT SEA. 173 

top-pieces ? Where the Roc whose eggs are 
possibly boulders, needing no far-fetched the- 
ory of glacier or iceberg to account for them ? 
Where the tails of the men of Kent ? Where 
the no legs of the bird of paradise ? Where 
the Unicorn, with that single horn of his, sov- 
ereign against all manner of poisons ? Where 
the Fountain of Youth ? Where that Thes- 
salian spring, which, without cost to the coun- 
try, convicted and punished perjurers ? Where 
the Amazons of Orellana ? All these, and a 
thousand other varieties, we have lost, and 
have got nothing instead of them. And those 
who have robbed us of them have stolen that 
which not enriches themselves. It is so much 
wealth cast into the sea beyond all approach 
of diving-bells. We owe no thanks to Mr. J. 
E. Worcester, whose Geography we studied 
enforcedly at school. Yet even he had his 
relentings, and in some softer moment vouch- 
safed us a fine, inspiring print of the Mael- 
strom, answerable to the twenty-four mile di- 
ameter of its suction. Year by year, more 



174 AT SEA. 

and more of the world gets disenchanted. 
Even the icy privacy of the arctic and an- 
tarctic circles is invaded. Our youth are no 
longer ingenious, as indeed no ingenuity is 
demanded of them. Everything is accounted 
for, everything cut and dried, and the world 
may be put together as easily as the fragments 
of a dissected map. The Mysterious bounds 
nothing now on the North, South, East, or 
West. We have played Jack Horner with 
our earth, till there is never a plum left in 
it. 



IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 

THE first sight of a shore so historical as 
that of Europe gives an American a 
Btrange thrill. What we always feel the artis- 
tic want of at home, is background. It is all 
idle to say we are Englishmen, and that Eng- 
lish history is ours too. It is precisely in this 
that we are not Englishmen, inasmuch as we 
only possess their history through our minds, 
and not by life-long association with a spot and 
an idea we call England. History without the 
soil it grew in, is more instructive than inspir- 
ing, — an acquisition, and not an inheritance. 
It is laid away in our memories, and does not 
run in our veins. Surely, in all that concerns 
esthetics, Europeans have us at an immense 
advantage. They start at a point which we 
arrive at after weary y^ars, for literature is 
not shut up in books, nor art m galleries : 



L76 IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 

both are taken in by unconscious absorption 
through the finer pores of mind and character 
in the atmosphere of society. We are not yet 
out of our Crusoe-hood, and must make our 
own tools as best we may. Yet I think we 
shall find the good of it one of these days, in 
being thrown back more wholly on nature ; 
and our literature, when we have learned to 
feel our own strength, and to respect our own 
thought because it is ours, and not because 
the European Mrs. Grundy agrees with it, 
will have a fresh flavor and a strong body 
that will recommend it, especially as what 
we import is watered more and more liberally 
with every vintage. 

My first glimpse of Europe was the shore 
of Spain. Since we got into the Mediterra- 
nean, we have been becalmed for some days 
within easy view of it. All along are fine 
mountains, brown all day, and with a bloom 
on them at sunset like that of a ripe plum 
Here and there at their fe3t little white towns 
are sprinkled along the edge of the water, like 



IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 177 

the grains of rice dropped by the princess in 
the story. Sometimes we see larger buildings 
on the mountain slopes, probably convents. 
I sit and wonder whether the farther peaks 
may not be the Sierra Morena (the rusty 
saw) of Don Quixote. I resolve that they 
shall be, and am content. Surely latitude 
and longitude never showed me any particu- 
lar respect, that I should be over-scrupulous 
with them. 

But after all, Nature, though she may be 
more beautiful, is nowhere so entertaining as 
in man, and the best thing I have seen and 
learned at sea is our Chief Mate. My first 
acquaintance with him was made over my 
knife, which he asked to look at, and, after 
a critical examination, handed back to me, 
saying, " I should n't wonder if that 'ere was 
a good piece o' stuff." Since then he has 
transferred a part of his regard for my knife 
to its owner. I like folks who like an honest 
bit of steel, and take no interest whatever in 
u your Raphaels, Correggios, and stuff." There 

8* I, 



178 IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 

is always more than the average human na- 
ture in a man who has a hearty sympathy with 
iron. It is a manly metal, with no sordid 
associations like gold and silver. My sailor 
fully came up to my expectation on further 
acquaintance. He might well be called an 
old salt who had been wrecked on Spitzbergen 
before I was born. He was not an Amer- 
ican, but I should never have guessed it by 
his speech, which was the purest Cape Cod, 
and I reckon myself a good taster of dialects. 
Nor was he less Americanized in all his 
thoughts and feelings, a singular proof of the 
ease with which our omnivorous country 
assimilates foreign matter, provided it be 
Protestant, for he was a man ere he became 
an American citizen. He used to walk the 
deck with his hands in his pockets, in seem- 
ing abstraction, but nothing escaped his eye. 
How he saw, I could never make out, though 
I had a theory that it was with his elbows. 
After he had taken me (or my knife) into 
his confidence, he took care that I should see 



IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 179 

whatever he deemed of interest to a lands- 
man. Without looking up, he would say, 
suddenly, " Ther 's a whale blowin' clear n 
up to win'ard," or, " Them 's porpises to 
leeward : that means change o' wind." He 
is as impervious to cold as a polar bear, and 
paces the deck during his watch much as 
one of those yellow hummocks goes slumping 
up and down his cage. On the Atlantic, if 
the wind blew a gale from the northeast, 
and it was cold as an English summer, he 
was sure to turn out in a calico shirt and 
trousers, his furzy brown chest half bare, 
and slippers, without stockings. But lest you 
might fancy this to have chanced by defect 
of wardrobe, he comes out in a monstrous 
pea-jacket here in the Mediterranean, when 
the evening is so hot that Adam would have 
been glad to leave off his fig-leaves. " It 's 
a kind o' damp and unwholesome in these 
ere waters," he says, evidently regarding the 
Midland Sea as a vile standing pool, in com- 
parison with the bluff ocean. At meals he is 



180 IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 

superb, not only for his strengths, but his 
weaknesses. He has some how or other come 
to think me a wag, and if I ask him to pass 
the butter, detects an occult joke, and laughs 
as much as is proper for a mate. For you 
must know that our social hierarchy on ship- 
board is precise, and the second mate, were 
he present, would only laugh half as much as 
the first. Mr. X. always combs his hair, and 
works himself into a black frock-coat (on 
Sundays he adds a waistcoat) before he comes 
to meals, sacrificing himself nobly and pain- 
fully to the social proprieties. The second 
mate, on the other hand, who eats after us, 
enjoys the privilege of shirt-sleeves, and is, I 
think, the happier man of the two. We do 
not have seats above and below the salt, as 
in old time, but above and below the white 
sugar. Mr. X. always takes brown sugar, 
and it is delightful to see how he ignores the 
existence of certain delicates which he con- 
siders above his grade, tipping his head on 
one side with an air of abstraction, so that h« 



IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 181 

may seem not to deny himself, but to omit 
helping himself from inadvertence or absence 
of mind. At such times he wrinkles his fore- 
head in a peculiar manner, inscrutable at first 
as a cuneiform inscription, but as easily read 
after you once get the key. The sense of it 
is something like this : " I, X., know my 
place, a height of wisdom attained by few. 
Whatever you may think, I do not see that 
currant jelly, nor that preserved grape. Es- 
pecially, a kind Providence has made me blind 
to bowls of white sugar, and deaf to the pop 
of champagne corks. It is much that a mer- 
ciful compensation gives me a sense of the 
dingier hue of Havana, and the muddier gur- 
gle of beer. Are there potted meats ? My 
physician has ordered me three pounds of 
minced salt-junk at every meal." There is 
such a thing, you know, as a ship's husband : 
X. is the ship's poor relation. 

As I have said, he takes also a below-the- 
white-sugar interest in the jokes, laughing by 
precise point of compass, just as he would lay 



182 IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 

the ship's course, all yawing being out of the 
question with his scrupulous decorum at the 
helm. Once or twice I have got the better 
of him, and touched him off into a kind of 
compromised explosion, like that of damp 
fireworks, that splutter and simmer a little, 
and then go out with painful slowness and 
occasional relapses. But his fuse is always 
of the unwillingest, and you must blow your 
match, and touch him off again an d again 
with the same joke. Or rather, you must 
magnetize him many times to get him en 
rapport with a jest. This once accomplished, 
you have him, and one bit of fun will last 
the whole voyage. He prefers those of one 
syllable, the a-b abs of humor. The gradual 
fattening of the steward, a. benevolent mulatto 
with whiskers and ear-rings, who looks as if 
he had been meant for a woman, and had 
become a man by accident, as in some of 
those stories of the elder physiologists, is an 
abiding topic of humorous comment with Mr 
K. M That 'ere stooard," he says, with a 



(N THE MEDITERRANEAN. 183 

brown giin like what you might fancy on the 
face of a serious and aged seal, " 's agittin' as 
fat 's a porpis. He was as thin 's a shingle 
when he come aboord last v'yge. Them 
trousis '11 bust yit. He don't darst take 'em 
off nights, for the whole ship's company 
could n't git him into 'em agin." And then 
he turns aside to enjoy the intensity of his 
emotion by himself, and you hear at intervals 
lrw rumblings, an indigestion of laughter. 
He tells me of St. Elmo's fires, MarvelFs 
corposants, though with him the original 
corpos santos has suffered a sea change and 
turned to comepleasants, pledges of fine weath 
er. I shall not soon find a pleasanter com- 
panion. It is so delightful to meet a man 
who knows just what you do not. Nay, I 
think the tired mind finds something in plump 
ignorance like what the body feels in cushiony 
moss. Talk of the sympathy of kindred pur- 
suits ! It is the sympathy of the upper and 
nether millstones, both forever grinding the 
*ame grist, and wearing each other smooth. 



L84 IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 

One has not far to seek for book-nature, artist- 
nature, every variety of superinduced nature, 
in short, but genuine human-nature is hard to 
find. And how good it is ! Wholesome as 
a potato, fit company for any dish. The 
freemasonry of cultivated men is agreeable, 
but artificial, and I like better the natural grip 
with which manhood recognizes manhood. 

X. has one good story, and with that I leave 
him, wishing him with all my heart that little 
inland farm at last which is his calenture as 
he paces the windy deck. One evening, 
when the clouds looked wild and whirling, 
I asked X. if it was coming on to blow. 
" No, I guess not," said- he ; " bumby the 
moon '11 be up, and scoff away that 'ere loose 
stuff." His intonation set the phrase " scoff 
away" in quotation-marks as plain as print. 
So I put a query in each eye, and he went 
on. " Ther' was a Dutch cappen onct, an 
his mate come to him in the cabin, where he 
Bot takhr his schnapps, an' says, 'Cappen. 
it 's agittin' thick, an' looks kin' o' squally 



IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 185 

hed n't we 's good 's shorten sail ? ' ' Gimmy 
my alminick,' says the cappen. So' he looks 
at it a spell, an' says he, * The moon 's due 
in less 'n half an hour, an' she '11 scoff away 
ev'ythin' clare agin.' So the mate he goes, 
an' bumby down he comes agin, an' says, 
* Cappen, this 'ere 's the allfiredest, power- 
fullest moon 't ever you did see. She 's 
scoffed away the maintogallants'l, an' she 's 
to work on the foretops'l now. Guess you 'd 
better look in the alminick agin, an' fin' out 
when this moon sets.' So the cappen thought 
't was 'bout time to go on deck. Dreadful 
slow them Dutch cappens be." And X. 
walked away, rumbling inwardly, like the rote 
of the sea heard afar. 

And so we arrived at Malta. Did you ever 
tear of one of those eating-houses, where, for 
a certain fee, the guest has the right to make 
one thrust with a fork into a huge pot, in 
which the whole dinner is bubbling, getting 
perhaps a bit of boiled meat, or a potato, or 
else nothing? Well, when the great caldron 



186 IN THE MEDITERRANEAN. 

of war is seething, and the nations stand round 
it striving to fish out something to their pur- 
pose from the mess, Britannia always has a 
great advantage in her trident. Malta is one 
of the titbits she has impaled with that awful 
implement. I was not sorry for it, when I 
reached my clean inn, with its kindly English 
landlady. 



ITALT. 

THE impulse which sent the Edelmann 
Storg and me to Subiaco was given 
Bomething like two thousand years ago. Had 
we not seen the Ponte Sant' Antonio, we should 
not have gone to Subiaco at this particular 
time ; and had the Romans been worse ma- 
sons, or more ignorant of hydrodynamics than 
they were, we should never have seen the 
Ponte Sant' Antonio. But first we went to 
Tivoli, — two carriage-loads of us, a very 
agreeable mixture of English, Scotch, and 
Yankees, — on Tuesday, the 20th April. I 
shall not say anything about Tivoli. A 
water-fall in type is likely to be a trifle stifF- 
ish. Old association and modern beauty ; 
nature and artifice , worship that has passed 
away and the religion that abides forever * 



188 ITALY. 

the green gush of the deeper torrent and the 
white evanescence of innumerable cascades, 
delicately palpitant as a fall of northern lights ; 
the descendants of Sabine pigeons flashing up 
to immemorial dove-cots, for centuries inac- 
cessible to man, trooping with noisy rooks 
and daws ; the fitful roar and the silently 
hovering iris, which, borne by the wind across 
the face of the cliff, transmutes the travertine 
to momentary opal, and whose dimmer ghost 
haunts the moonlight, — as well attempt to 
describe to a Papuan savage that wondrous 
ode of Wordsworth which rouses and stirs in 
the soul all its dormant instincts of resur- 
rection as with a sound of the last trumpet. 
No, it is impossible. Even Byron's pump 
sucks sometimes, and gives an unpleasant dry 
wheeze, especially, it seems to me, at Terni. 
It is guide-book poetry, enthusiasm manufac- 
tured by the yard, which the hurried traveller 
(John and Jonathan are always in a hurry 
when they turn peripatetics) puts on when 
ne has not a rag of private imagination U 



ITALY. 189 

jover his nakedness withal. It must be a 
queer kind of love that could " watch mad- 
ness with unalterable mien," when the patient, 
whom any competent physician would have 
ordered into a strait-waistcoat long ago, has 
shivered himself to powder down a precipice. 
But there is no madness in the matter. Veli- 
no goes over in his full senses, and knows per- 
fectly well that he shall not be hurt, that his 
broken fragments will reunite more glibly than 
the head and neck of Orrilo. He leaps exult- 
ant, as to his proper doom and fulfilment, and 
out of the mere waste and spray of his glory 
the god of sunshine and song builds over the 
crowning moment of his destiny a triumphal 
arch beyond the reach of time and of decay. 
But Milton is the only man who has got much 
poetry out of a cataract, — and that was a 
cataract in his eye. 

The first day we made the Giro, coming 
back to a merry dinner at the Sibilla in the 
evening. Then we had some special tea, — 
hr the Italians think tea-drinking the cnief 



190 ITALY. 

religious observance of the Inglesi, — and then 
we had fifteen pauls' worth of illumination, 
which wrought a sudden change in the scen- 
ery, like those that seem so matter-of-course 
in dreams, turning the Claude we had seen 
in the morning into a kind of Piranesi-Rem- 
brandt. The illumination, by the way, which 
had been prefigured to us by the enthusiastic 
Italian who conducted it as something second 
only to the Girandola, turned out to be one 
blue-light and two armfuls of straw. 

The Edelmann Storg is not fond of pedes- 
trian locomotion, — nay, I have even some- 
times thought that he looked upon the inven- 
tion of legs as a private and personal wrong 
done to himself. I am quite sure that he in- 
wardly believes them to have been a conse- 
quence of the fall, and that the happier Pre- 
Adamites were monopodes, and incapable of 
any but a vehicular progression. A carriage, 
with horses and driver complete, he takes to 
be as simple a production of nature as a po- 
tato. But he is fond of sketching, and aftei 



ITALY. 191 

breakfast, on the beautiful morning of Wed- 
nesday, the 21st, I persuaded him to walk out 
a mile or two and see a fragment of aqueduct 
ruin. It is a single glorious arch, buttressing 
the mountain-side upon the edge of a sharp 
descent to the valley of the Anio. The old 
road to Subiaco passes under it, and it is 
crowned by a crumbling tower built in the 
Middle Ages (whenever that was) against the 
Gaetani. While Storg sketched, I clambered. 
Below you, where the valley widens greenly 
toward other mountains, which the ripe Ital- 
ian air distances with a bloom like that on 
unplucked grapes, are more arches, ossified 
arteries of what was once the heart of the 
world. Storg's sketch was highly approved 
of by Leopoldo, our guide, and by three or 
tour peasants, who, being on their way to 
their morning's work in the fields, had, of 
course, nothing in particular to do, and stopped 
to see us see the ruin. Any one who has 
remarked how grandly the Romans do noth- 
ing will be slow to believe them an effete 



192 iTALy. 

race. Their style is as the colossal to all 
other, and the name of Eternal City fits Rome 
also, because time is of no account in it. The 
Roman always waits as if he could afford it 
amply, and the slow centuries move quite fast 
enough for him. Time is to other races the 
field of a task-master, which they must pain- 
fully till ; but to the Roman it is an entailed 
estate, which he enjoys and will transmit. 
The Neapolitan's laziness is that of a loafer ; 
the Roman's is that of a noble. The poor 
Anglo-Saxon must count his hours, and look 
twice at his small change of quarters and min- 
utes ; but the Roman spends from a purse of 
Fortunatus. His 'piccolo quarto (Tora is like 
his grosso, a huge piece of copper, big enough 
for a shield, which stands only for a half-dime 
of our money. We poor fools of time always 
nurry as if we were the last type of man, the 
full stop with which Fate was closing the colo- 
phon of her volume, — as if w r e had just read 
in our newspaper, as we do of the banks on 
holidays, H^ The world will close to-day at 



ITALY. 193 

twelve o'clock, an hour earlier than usual. 
But the Roman is still an Ancient, with a 
vast future before him to tame and occupy. 
He and his ox and his plough are just as they 
were in Virgil's time or Ennius's. We beat 
him in many things ; but in the impregnable 
fastness of his great rich nature he defies us. 
We got back to Tivoli, — Storg affirming 
that he had walked fifteen miles. We saw 
the Temple of Cough, which is not the Tem- 
ple of Cough, though it might have been a 
votive structure put up by some Tiburtine 
Dr. Wistar. We saw the villa of Mecsenas, 
which is not the villa of Mecaenas, and other 
equally satisfactory antiquities. All our Eng- 
lish friends sketched the Citadel, of course, 
and one enthusiast attempted a likeness of the 
fall, which I unhappily mistook afterward for 
a semblance of the tail of one of the horses 
on the Monte Cavallo. Then we went to the 
Villa d' Este, famous on Ariosto's account, — 
und which Ariosto never saw. But the lau- 
rels were worthy to have made a chaplet for 
9 m 



194 ITALY. 

him, and the cypresses and the views were as 
fine as if he had seen them every day of his 
life. 

Perhaps something I learned in going to see 
one of the gates of the town is more to the 
purpose, and may assist one in erecting the 
horoscope of Italia Unita. When Leopoldo 
first proposed to drag me through the mud to 
view this interesting piece of architecture, I 
demurred. But as he was very earnest about 
it, and as one seldom fails getting at a bit 
of character by submitting to one's guide, I 
yielded. Arrived at the spot, he put me at 
the best point of view, and said, — 

"Behold, Lordship!" 

" I see nothing out of the common," said I. 

" Lordship is kind enough here to look at 
a gate, the like of which exists not in all Italy, 
nay, in the whole world, — I speak not of 
England," for he thought me an Inglese. 

" I am not blind, Leopoldo ; where is the 
miracle ? " 

" Here we dammed up the waters of the 



ITALY. 



195 



A.nio, first by artifice conducted to this spot, 
and letting them out upon the Romans, who 
stood besieging the town, drowned almost a 
whole army of them. (Lordship conceives ?) 
They suspected nothing till they found them- 
selves all torn to pieces at the foot of the hill 
yonder. (Lordship conceives ?) Uh I per 
Baceo ! we watered their porridge for them." 

Leopoldo used we as Lord Buchan did I 9 
meaning any of his ancestors. 

" But tell me a little, Leopoldo, how many 
years is it since this happened ? " 

" JSfon saprei, signoria ; it was in the an- 
tiquest times, certainly ; but the Romans 
never come to our Fair, that we don't have 
blows about it, and perhaps a stab or two. 
Lordship understands ? " 

I was quite repaid for my pilgrimage. I 
think I understand Italian politics better for 
^earing Leopoldo speak of the Romans, whose 
great dome is in full sight of Tivoli, as a for- 
eign nation. But what perennial boyhood the 
wnole story indicates ! 



196 ITALY. 

Storg's sketch of the morning's ruin was 
bo successful that I seduced him into a new 
expedition to the Ponte Sant' Antonio, an- 
other aqueduct arch about eight miles off. 
This was for the afternoon, and I succeeded 
the more easily, as we were to go on horse- 
back. So I told Leopoldo to be at the gate 
of the Villa of Hadrian, at three o'clock, with 
three horses. Leopoldo's face, when I said 
three, was worth seeing ; for the poor fellow 
had counted on nothing more than trotting 
beside our horses for sixteen miles, and get- 
ting half a dollar in the evening. Between 
doubt and hope, his face seemed to exude a 
kind of oil, which made it shine externally, 
after having first lubricated all the muscles 
inwardly. 

" With three horses, Lordship ? " 

"Yes, three." 

"Lordship is very sagacious. With three 
horses they go much quicker. It is finished, 
then, and they will have the kindness to find 
me at the gate with the beasts, at three o'clock 
precisely." 



ITALY. 197 

LeopoMo and I had compromised upon the 
term " Lordship." He had found me in the 
morning celebrating due rites before the Sib- 
yl's Temple with strange incense of the ni- 
cotian herb, and had marked me for his prey. 
At the very high tide of sentiment, when the 
traveller lies with oyster-like openness in the 
soft ooze of reverie, do these parasitic crabs, 
the ciceroni, insert themselves as his insepa- 
rable bosom companions. Unhappy bivalve, 
lying so softly between thy two shells, of the 
actual and the possible, the one sustaining, 
the other widening above thee, till, oblivious 
of native mud, thou fanciest thyself a proper 
citizen only of the illimitable ocean which 
floods thee, — there is no escape ! Vain are 
thy poor crustaceous efforts at self-isolation. 
The foe henceforth is a part of thy conscious- 
ness, thy landscape, and thyself, happy only 
if that irritation breed ir thee the pearl of 
patience and of voluntary abstraction. 

" Excellency wants a guide, very expe- 
rienced, who has conducted with great mutual 
satisfaction many of his poble compatriots." 



198 ITALY. 

Puff, puff, and an attempt at looking as if 
I did not see him. 

" Excellency will deign to look at my book 
of testimonials. When we return, Excellency 
will add his own.' 

Puff, puff. 

" Excellency regards the cascade, prceeeps 
Anio, as the good Horatius called it." 

I thought of the dissolve frigus of the land- 
lord in Roderick Random, and could not help 
smiling. Leopoldo saw his advantage. 

" Excellency will find Leopoldo, when he 
shall choose to be ready." 

" But I will positively not be called Excel- 
lency. I am not an ambassador, nor a very 
eminent Christian, and the phrase annoys 
me. 

" To be sure, Excell — Lordship." 

" I am an American." 

" Certainly, an American, Lordship," — as 
if that settled the matter entirely. If I had 
told him I was a Caffre, it would have been 
just as clear to him. He surrendered the 



ITALY. 199 

" Excellency," but on general principles of 
human nature, I suppose, would not come a 
step lower than " Lordship." So we compro- 
mised on that. — P. S. It is wonderful how 
soon a republican ear reconciles itself with 
syllables of this description. I think citizen 
would find greater difficulties in the way of 
its naturalization, and as for brother — ah ! 
well, in a Christian sense, certainly. 

Three o'clock found us at the Villa of Ha- 
drian. We had explored that incomparable 
ruin, and consecrated it, in the Homeric and 
Anglo-Saxon manner, by eating and drinking. 
Some of us sat in the shadow of one of the 
great walls, fitter for a city than a palace, 
over which a Nile of ivy, gushing from one 
narrow source, spread itself in widening in- 
undations. A happy few listened to stories 

of Bagdad from Mrs. , whose silver hair 

gleamed, a palpable anachronism, like a snow- 
fall in May, over that ever-youthful face, 
<vhere the few sadder lines seemed but the 
lignature of Age to a deed of quitclaim and 



200 ITALY. 

release. Dear Tito, that exemplary traveller 
who never lost a day, had come hack from 
renewed explorations, convinced by the elo- 
quent custode that Serapeion was the name 
of an officer in the Praetorian Guard. I was 
explaining, in addition, that Naumachia, in 
the Greek tongue, signified a place artificially 
drained, when the horses were announced. 

This put me to reflection. I felt, perhaps, 
a little as Mazeppa must, when told that his 
steed was at the door. For several years I 
had not been on the back of a horse, and was 
it not more than likely that these mountains 
might produce a yet more refractory breed 
of these fer©cious animals than common ? 
Who could tell the effect of grazing on a 
volcanic soil like that hereabout ? I had 
vague recollections that the saddle nullified 
the laws governing the impulsion of inert 
bodies, exacerbating the centrifugal forces 
into a virulent activity, and proportionably 
narcotizing the centripetal. The phrase ratio 
proportioned to the squares of the distance* 



ITALY. 201 

impressed me with an awe which explained 
to me how the laws of nature had been of 
old personified and worshipped. Meditating 
these things, I walked with a cheerful aspect 
to the gate, where my saddled and bridled 
martyrdom awaited me. 

" Eccomi qua!" said Leopoldo, hilariously. 
" Gentlemen will be good enough to select 
from the three best beasts in Tivoli." 

" O, this one will serve me as well as 
any," said I, with an air of indifference, much 
as I have seen a gentleman help himself inad- 
vertently to the best peach in the dish. I 
am not more selfish than becomes a Christian 
of the nineteenth century, but I looked on 
this as a clear case of tabula in naufragio, 
and had noticed that the animal in question 
had that tremulous droop of the lower lip 
which indicates senility, and the abdication of 
the wilder propensities. Moreover, he was 
the only one provided with a curb bit, or 
rather with two huge iron levers which might 
almost have served Archimedes for his prob- 

9* 



202 ITALY. 

lem. Our saddles were flat cushions covered 
with leather, brought by years of friction to 
the highest state of polish. Instead of a 
pommel, a perpendicular stake, about ten 
inches high, rose in front, which, in case of 
a stumble, would save one's brains, at the 
risk of certain evisceration. Behind, a glary 
slope invited me constantly to slide over the 
horse's tail. The selfish prudence of my 
choice had well-nigh proved the death of 
me, for this poor old brute, with that anxi- 
ety to oblige a forestiero which characterizes 
everybody here, could never make up his 
mind which of his four paces (and he had 
the -rudiments of four — walk, trot, rack, and 
gallop) would be most agreeable to me. The 
period of transition is always unpleasant, and 
it was all transition. He treated me to a 
hodge-podge of all his several gaits at once. 
Saint Vitus was the only patron saint I could 
think of. My head jerked one way, my body 
unother, while each of my legs became a 
pendulum vibrating furiously, one alwayi 



ITALY. 203 

forward while the other was back, so that I 
had all the appearance and all the labor of 
going afoot, and at the same time was bumped 
within an inch of my life. Waterton's al- 
ligator was nothing to it ; it was like riding 
a hard- trotting armadillo bare-backed. There 
is a species of equitation peculiar to our native 
land, in which a rail from the nearest fence, 
with no preliminary incantation of Horse and 
hattock! is converted into a steed, and this 
alone may stand the comparison. Storg in 
the mean while was triumphantly taking the 
lead, his trousers working up very pleasantly 
above his knees, an insurrectionary movement 
which I also was unable to suppress in my 
own. I could bear it no longer. 

" Le-e-o-o-p-o-o-o-l-l-l-d-d-o-o-o ! " jolted I. 

" Command, Lordship ! " and we both came 
to a stop. 

" It is necessary that we change horses 
immediately, or I shall be jelly." 

" Certainly, Lordship"; and I soon had the 
pathetic satisfaction of seeing him subjected 



204 ITALY. 

to all the excruciating experiments that had 
been tried upon myself. Fiat experimentum 
in corpore vili, thought his extempore lord- 
ship, Christopher Sly, to himself. 

Meanwhile all the other accessories of our 
ride were delicious. It was a clear, cool day, 
and we soon left the high road for a bridle- 
path along the side of the mountain, among 
gigantic olive-trees, said to be five hundred 
years old, and which had certainly employed 
all their time in getting into the weirdest and 
wonderfullest shapes. Clearly in this green 
commonwealth there was no heavy roller of 
public opinion to flatten all character to a 
lawn-like uniformity. Everything was indi- 
vidual and eccentric. And there was some- 
thing fearfully human, too, in the wildest 
contortions. It was some such wood that 
gave Dante the hint of his human forest in 
the seventh circle, and I should have dreaded 
lo break a twig, lest I should hear that voice 

complaining, 

" Perchfc mi scerpi ? 

Non hai tu spirto di pietate alcuno 1 " 



ITALY. 205 

Our path lay along a kind of terrace, and at 
e\ery opening we had glimpses of the billowy 
Campagna, with the great dome bulging from 
its rim, while on our right, changing ever as 
we rode, the Alban mountain showed us some 
new grace of that sweeping outline peculiar 
to volcanoes. At intervals the substructions 
of Roman villas would crop out from the soil 
like masses of rock, and deserving to rank as 
a geological formation by themselves. In- 
deed, in gazing into these dark caverns, one 
does not think of man more than at Staffa. 
Nature has adopted these fragments of a race 
who were dear to her. She has not suffered 
these bones of the great Queen to lack due 
sepulchral rites, but has flung over them the 
ceremonial handfuls of earth, and every year 
carefully renews the garlands of memorial 
flowers. Nay, if what they say in Rome be 
true, she has even made a new continent of 
the Colosseum, and given it a flora of its 
[>wn. 

Ad length, descending a little, we passed 



206 ITALY. 

through farm-yards and cultivated fields, 
where, from Leopoldo's conversations with 
the laborers, we discovered that he himself 
did not know the way for which he had un- 
dertaken to be guide. However, we presently 
came to our ruin, and very noble it was. The 
aqueduct had here been carried across a deep 
gorge, and over the little brook which wim- 
pled along below towered an arch, as a bit 
of Shakespeare bestrides the exiguous rill of 
a discourse which it was intended to ornament. 
The only human habitation in sight was a 
little casetta on the top of a neighboring hill. 
What else of man's work could be seen was 
a ruined castle of the Middle Ages, and, far 
away upon the horizon, the eternal dome. 
A valley in the moon could scarce have been 
lonelier, could scarce have suggested more 
strongly the feeling of preteriteness and ex- 
tinction. The stream below did not seem so 
much to sing as to murmur sadly, Conclusurr 
est; periisli! and the wind, sighing through 
the arch, answered, Periisti! Nor was the 



ITALY. 207 

silence of Monte Cavi without meaning. That 
cup, once full of fiery wine, in which it 
pledged Vesuvius and -ZEtna later born, was 
brimmed with innocent water now. Adam 
came upon the earth too late to see the glaro 
of its last orgy, lighting the eyes of saurians 
in the reedy Campagna below. I almost fan- 
cied I could hear a voice like that which cried 
to the Egyptian pilot, Great Pan is dead! 
I was looking into the dreary socket where 
once glowed the eye that saw the whole earth 
vassal. Surely, this was the world's autumn, 
and I could hear the feet of Time rustling 
through the wreck of races and dynasties, 
cheap and inconsiderable as fallen leaves. 

But a guide is not engaged to lead one into 
the world of imagination. He is as deadly to 
sentiment as a sniff of hartshorn. His posi- 
tion is a false one, like that of the critic, who 
is supposed to know everything, and expends 
himself in showing that he does not. If you 
should ever have the luck to attend a concert 
of the spheres, under the protection of an 



208 ITALY. 

Italian cicerone, he will expect you to listen 
to him rather than to it. He will say : " Ec- 
co, Signoria, that one in the red mantle is 
Signor Mars, eh ! what a noblest basso is 
Signer Mars ! but nothing (Lordship under- 
stands ?) to what Signor Saturn used to be, 
(he with the golden belt, Signoria,') only his 
voice is in ruins now, — scarce one note left 
upon another ; but Lordship can see what it 
was by the remains, Roman remains, Signoria, 
Roman remains, the work of giants. (Lordship 
understands ?) They make no such voices 
now. Certainly, Signor Jupiter (with the 
yellow tunic, there) is a brave artist and a 
most sincere tenor ; but since the time of the 
Republic " (if he think you an oscurante, or 
since the French, if he suspect you of being 
the least red) " we have no more good sing- 
ing." And so on. 

It is a well-known fact to all persons who 
are in the habit of climbing Jacob' s-ladders, 
that, if any one speak to you during the opera- 
tion, the fabric collapses, and you come some 



ITALY. 209 

what uncomfortably to the ground. One can 
be hit with a remark, when he is beyond the 
reach of more material missiles. Leopoldo 
saw by my abstracted manner that I was get- 
ting away from him, and I was the only vic- 
tim he had left, for Storg was making a sketch 
below. So he hastened to fetch me down 
again. 

" Nero built this arch, Lordship." (He did 
n't, but Nero was Leopoldo's historical scape- 
goat.) " Lordship sees the dome ? he will 
deign to look the least little to the left hand. 
Lordship has much intelligence. Well, Nero 
always did thus. His w f orks always, always, 
had Home in view." 

He had already shown me two ruins, which 
he ascribed equally to Nero, and which could 
only have seen Rome by looking through a 
mountain. However, such trifles are nothing 
to an accomplished guide. 

I remembered his quoting Horace in the 
morning. 

" Do you understand Latm, Leopoldo ? " 



210 ITALY. 

" I did a little once, Lordship. I went to 
the Jesuits' school at Tivoli. But what use 
of Latin to a poverino like me ? " 

" Were you intended for the church ? Why 
did you leave the school ? " 

" Eh, Lordship ! " and one of those shrugs 
which might mean that he left it of his own 
free will, or that he was expelled at point of 
toe. He added some contemptuous phrase 
about the priests. 

" But, Leopoldo, you are a good Catho- 
lic ? " 

" Eh, Lordship, who knows ? A man is 
no blinder for being poor, — nay, hunger 
sharpens the eyesight sometimes. The car- 
dinals (their Eminences !) tell us that it is 
good to be poor, and that, in proportion as 
We lack on earth, it shall be made up to us 
in Paradise. Now, if the cardinals (their 
Eminences !) believe what they preach, why 
do they want to ride in such handsome car- 
riages ?" 

" But are there many who think as you 
4o?" 



ITALY. 211 

•' Everybody, Lordship, but a few women 
and fools. What imports it what the fools 
think ? " 

An immense deal, I thought, an immense 
deal ; for of what material is public opinion 
manufactured ? 

"Do you ever go to church ? " 

" Once a year, Lordship, at Easter, to mass 
and confession." 

" Why once a year ? " 

" Because, Lordship, one must have a cer- 
tificate from the priest. One might be sent 
to prison else, and one had rather go to 
confession than to jail. Eh, Lordship, it is a 
porcheria" 

It is proper to add, that in what Leopoldo 
said of the priests he was not speaking of his 
old masters, the Jesuits. One never hears 
anything in Italy against the purity of their 
lives, or their learning and ability, though 
much against their unscupulousness. Nor 
will any one who has ever enjoyed the 
gentle and dignified hospitality of the Bene- 



£12 ITALY. 

iictines be ready to believe any evil report 
of them. 

By this time Storg had finished his sketch, 
and we remounted our grazing steeds. They 
were brisker as soon as their noses were 
turned homeward, and we did the eight miles 
back in an hour. The setting sun streamed 
through and among the Michael Angelesque 
olive-trunks, and, through the long colonnade 
of the bridle-path, fired the scarlet waistcoats 
and bodices of homeward villagers, or was 
sullenly absorbed in the long black cassock 
and flapped hat of a priest, who courteously 
saluted the strangers. Sometimes a mingled 
flock of sheep and goats (as if they had 
walked out of one of Claude's pictures) 
followed the shepherd, who, satyr-like, in 
goat-skin breeches, sang such songs as were 
acceptable before Tubal Cain struck out the 
aws of musical time from his anvil. The 
peasant, in his ragged brown cloak, or with 
blue jacket hanging from the left shoulder, 
still strides Romanly, — incedit rex, — and hit 



ITALY. 213 

eyes have a placid grandeur, inherited from 
those which watched the glittering snake of 
the Triumph, as it undulated along the Via 
Sacra. By his side moves with equal pace 
his woman-porter, the caryatid of a vast 
entablature of household-stuff, and learning 
in that harsh school a sinuous poise of body 
and a security of step beyond the highest 
snatch of the posture-master. 

As we drew near Tivoli the earth was 
fast swinging into shadow. The darkening 
Campagna, climbing the sides of the nearer 
Monticelli in a gray belt of olive-spray, rolled 
on towards the blue island of Soracte, behind 
which we lost the sun. Yes, we had lost the 
Bun ; but in the wide chimney of the largest 
room at the Sibilla there danced madly, 
crackling with ilex and laurel, a bright am- 
bassador from Sunland, Monsieur Le Feu, 
no pinchbeck substitute for his royal master. 
A.s we drew our chairs up, after the dinner 
due to Leopoldo's forethought, " Behold," 
said I, " the Resident of the great king neat 



214 ITALY. 

the court of our (this-day-created) Hogan 

Moganships." 

We sat looking into the fire, as it wavered 
from shining shape to shape of unearthliest 
fantasy, and both of us, no doubt, making 
out old faces among the embers, for we both 
said together, " Let us talk of old times." 

" To the small hours," said the Edelmann ; 
" and instead of blundering off to Torneo to 
intrude chatteringly upon the midnight pri- 
vacy of Apollo, let us promote the fire, there, 
to the rank of sun by brevet, and have a 
kind of undress rehearsal of those night wan- 
derings of his here upon the ample stage of 
the hearth." 

So we went through the whole catalogue 
of Do you remembers f and laughed at all the 
old stories, so dreary to an outsider. Then 
we grew pensive, and talked of the empty 
sockets in that golden band of our young 
friendship, — of S., with Grecian front, but 
tuisevere, and Saxon M., to whom laugh tei 
Was as natural as for a brook to ripple. 



ITALY. 215 

But Leopoldo had not done with us. We 
were to get back to Rome in the morning, 
and to that end must make a treaty with the 
company which ran the Tivoli diligence, the 
next day not being the regular period of 
departure for that prodigious structure. We 
had given Leopoldo twice his fee, and, setting 
a mean value upon our capacities in propor- 
tion, he expected to bag a neat percentage 
on our bargain. Alas ! he had made a false 
estimate of the Arglo-Norman mind, which, 
capable of generosity as a compliment to 
itself, will stickle for the dust in the balance 
in a matter of business, and would blush at 
being done by Mercury himself. 

Accordingly, at about nine o'clock there 
came a knock at the door, and, answering 
our Favorisca ! in stalked Leopoldo, gravely 
followed by the two commissioners of the 
company. 

" Behold me returned, Lordship, and these 
toen are the Vetturini" 

Why is it that men wno have to do witi 



210 ITALY. 

horses are the same all over Christendom ? 
Is it that they acquire equine characteristics, 
or that this particular mystery is magnetic tc 
certain sorts of men ? Certainly they are 
marked unmistakably, and these two worthies 
would have looked perfectly natural in York- 
shire or Vermont. They were just alike, — 
fortemque Gryan, fortemque Cloanthum, — and 
you could not split an epithet between them. 
Simultaneously they threw back their large 
overcoats, and displayed spheroidal figures, 
over which the strongly pronounced stripes 
of their plaided waistcoats ran like parallels 
of latitude and longitude over a globe. Si- 
multaneously they took off their hats and said, 
" Your servant, gentlemen." In Italy it is 
always necessary to make a eombinazione be- 
c orehand about even the most customary mat- 
ters, for there is no fixed highest price for 
anything. For a minute or two we stood reck- 
oning each other's forces. Then I opened 
the first trench with the usual, " How much 
do you wish for carrying us to Rome at half 
oast seven to-morrow morning ? " 



ITALY. 217 

The enemy glanced, one at the other, and 
She result of this ocular witenagemot was that 
me said, " Four scudi, gentlemen." 

The Edelmann Storg took his cigar from his 
/nouth in order to whistle, and made a rather 
indecorous allusion to four gentlemen in the 
diplomatic service of his Majesty, the Prince 
of the Powers of the Air. 

" Whe-ew ! quattro diavoli ! " said he. 

"MaceheJ" exclaimed I, attempting a flank- 
movement, " I had rather go on foot ! " and 
threw as much horror into my face as if a 
proposition had been made to me to commit 
robbery, murder, and arson all together. 

" For less than three scudi and a half the 
diligence parts not from Tivoli at an extraor- 
dinary hour," said the stout man, with an 
imperturbable gravity, intended to mask his 
retreat, and to make it seem that he was mak- 
ing the same proposal as at first. 

Storg saw that they wavered, and opened 

upon them with his flying artillery of sar 

tasm. 

10 



218 ITALY. 

44 Do you take us for Inglesi f We are 
very well here, and will stay at the Sibilla," 
he sniffed scornfully. 

44 How much will Lordship give ? " (This 
was showing the white feather.) 

44 Fifteen pauls," (a scudo and a half,) 
14 buonamano included." 

44 It is impossible, gentlemen ; for less than 
two scudi and a half the diligence parts not 
from Tivoli at an extraordinary hour." 

44 Fifteen pauls." 

44 Will Lordship give two scudi ? " (with a 
slight flavor of mendicancy.) 

44 Fifteen pauls," (growing firm as we saw 
them waver.) 

44 Then, gentlemen, it is all over ; it is im- 
possible, gentlemen." 

44 Very good ; a pleasant evening to you ! " 
and they bowed themselves out. 

As soon as the door closed behind them, 
Leopoldo, who had looked on in more and 
more anxious silence as the chance of plundei 
was whittled slimmer and slimmer by the 



ITALY. 219 

ftharp edges of the parley, saw instantly that 
it was for his interest to turu state's evidence 
against his accomplices. 

" They will be back in a moment," he said 
knowingly, as if he had been of our side all 
along. 

" Of course; we are aware of that." — It 
is always prudent to be aware of everything 
in travelling. 

And, sure enough, in five minutes re-enter 
the stout men, as gravely as if everything had 
been thoroughly settled, and ask respectfully 
at what hour we would have the diligence. 

This will serve as a specimen of Italian 
bargain -making. They do not feel happy if 
they get their first price. So easy a victory 
makes them sorry they had not asked twice 
as much, and, besides, they love the excite- 
ment of the contest. I have seen as much 
debate over a little earthen pot (value two 
cents) on the Ponte Vecchio, in Florence, as 
would have served for an operation of millions 
in the funds, the demand and the offer alter- 



220 ITALY. 

nating so rapidly that the litigants might be 
Bupposed to be playing the ancient game of 
morra. It is a part of the universal fondness 
for gaming, and lotteries. An English gentle- 
man once asked his Italian courier how large 
a percentage he made on all of his employ- 
er's money which passed through his hands. 
" About five per cent ; sometimes more, some- 
times less," was the answer. " Well, I will 
add that to your salary, in order that I may 
be rid of this uncomfortable feeling of being 
cheated." The courier mused a moment, and 
said, " But no, sir, I should not be happy ; 
then it would not be sometimes more, some- 
times less, and I should miss the excitement 
of the game." 

22c?. — This morning the diligence was at 
the door punctually, and, taking our seats in 
the coupe, we bade farewell to La Sibilla. But 
first we ran back for a parting glimpse at the 
tvater-fall. These last looks, like lovers' last 
feisses, are nouns of multitude, and presently 
the povero stalliere, signori, waited upon us 



ITALY. 221 

cap in hand, telling us that the vetturino was 
impatient, and begging for drink-money in 
the same breath. Leopoldo hovered longingly 
afar, for these vultures respect times and sea- 
sons, and while one is fleshing his beak upon 
the foreign prey, the others forbear. The 
passengers in the diligence were not very 
lively. The Romans are a grave people, and 
more so than ever since '49. Of course, there 
was one priest among them. There always 
is ; for the mantis religiosa is as inevitable to 
these public conveyances as the curculio is to 
the plum, and one could almost fancy that 
they were bred in the same way, — that the 
egg was inserted when the vehicle was green, 
became developed as it ripened, and never 
left it till it dropped withered from the pole. 
There was nothing noticeable on the road to 
Rome, except the strings of pack-horses and 
mules which we met returning with empty 
lime-sacks to Tivoli, whence comes the supply 
of Rome. A railroad was proposed, but the 
government would not allow it % because it 



222 ITALY. 

would interfere with this carrying-trade, and 
wisely granted instead a charter for a road to 
Frascati, where there was no business what- 
ever to be interfered with. About a mile 
of this is built in a style worthy of ancient 
Rome ; and it is possible that eventually an- 
other mile may be accomplished, for some 
half-dozen laborers are at work upon it with 
wheelbarrows, in the leisurely Roman fashion. 
If it is ever finished, it will have nothing to 
carry but the conviction of its own useless- 
ness. A railroad has been proposed to Civita 
Vecchia ; but that is out of the question, be- 
cause it would be profitable. On the whole, 
one does not regret the failure of these schemes. 
One would not approach the solitary emotion 
of a lifetime, such as is the first sight of Rome, 
at the rate of forty miles an hour. It is bet- 
ter, after painfully crawling up one of those 
long paved hills, to have the postilion turn in 
his saddle, and, pointing with his whip, (wkh 
out looking, for he knows instinctively where 
tt is,) say, Ecco San Pietro ! Then you lool 



ITALY. 223 

tremblingly, and see it hovering visionary on 
the horizon's verge, and in a moment you are 
rattling and rumbling and wallowing down 
into the valley, and it is gone. So you play 
hide-and-seek with it all the rest of the way, 
and have time to converse with your sensa- 
tions. You fancy you have got used to it at 
last ; but from the next hill-top, lo, there it 
looms again, a new wonder, and you do not 
feel sure that it will keep its tryst till you find 
yourself under its shadow. The Dome is to 
Rome what Vesuvius is to Naples ; only a 
greater wonder, for Michael Angelo hung it 
there. The traveller climbs it as he would 
a mountain, and finds the dwellings of men 
high up on its sacred cliffs. It has its annual 
eruption, too, at Easter, when the fire trickles 
and palpitates down its mighty shoulders, seen 
from far-off Tivoli. — No, the locomotive is 
less impertinent at Portici, hailing the impris- 
oned Titan there with a kindred shriek. Let 
it not vex the solemn Roman ghosts, or the 
nobly desolate Campagna, with whose soli- 



224 ITALY. 

tudes the shattered vertebrae of the aqueducts 
are in truer sympathy. 

24:th. — To-day our journey to Subiaco prop* 
erly begins. The jocund morning had called 
the beggars to their street-corners, and the 
women to the windows ; the players of- morra 
(sl game probably as old as the invention of 
fingers), of chuck-farthing, and of bowls, had 
cheerfully begun the labors of the day ; the 
plaintive cries of the chair-seaters, frog- 
venders, and certain other peripatetic mer- 
chants, the meaning of whose vocal adver- 
tisements I could never penetrate, quaver at 
regular intervals, now near and now far 
away ; a solitary Jew with a sack over his 
shoulder, and who never is seen to stop, 
slouches along, every now and then croaking 
a penitential Cenei! as if he were somehow 
the embodied expiation (by some post-0 vid- 
ian metamorphosis) of that darkest Roman 
tragedy ; women are bargaining for lettuce 
and endive ; the slimy Triton in the Piazza 
Barberina spatters himself with vanishing 



ITALY. 225 

diamonds ; a peasant leads an ass on which 
sits the mother with the babe in her arms, — 
a living flight into Egypt ; in short, the 
beautiful spring day had awakened all of 
Rome that can awaken yet (for the ideal 
Rome waits for another morning), when we 
rattled along in our carrettella on the way to 
Palestrina. A carrettella is to the perfected 
vehicle, as the coracle to the steamship ; it is 
the first crude conception of a wheeled car- 
riage. Doubtless the inventor of it was a 
prodigious genius in his day, and rode proudly 
in it, envied by the more fortunate pedes- 
trian, and cushioned by his own inflated 
imagination. If the chariot of Achilles were 
like it, then was Hector happier at the tail 
than the son of Thetis on the box. It is an 
oblong basket upon two wdieels, with a single 
seat rising in the middle. We had not jarred 
over a hundred yards of the Quattro Fon- 
tane, before we discovered that no elastic 
propugnaculum had been interposed between 
the body and the axle, so that we sat, as it 
jo* o 



226 ITALY. 

were, on paving-stones, mitigated only by so 
much as well-seasoned ilex is less flinty- 
hearted than tufo or breccia. If there were 
any truth in the theory of developments, I 
am certain that we should have been fur- 
nished with a pair of rudimentary elliptical 
springs, at least, before half our day's journey 
was over. However, as one of those happy 
illustrations of ancient manners, which one 
meets with so often here, it was instructive ; 
for I now clearly understand that it was not 
merely by reason of pomp that Hadrian used 
to be three days in getting to his villa, only 
twelve miles off. In spite of the author of 
" Vestiges," Nature, driven to extremities, 
can develop no more easy cushion than a 
blister, and no doubt treated an ancient em- 
peror and a modern republican with severe 
impartiality. 

It w r as difficult to talk without biting one's 
tongue ; but as soon as we had got fairly 
beyond the gate, and out of sight of the last 
red-legged French soldier, and tightly-but 



ITALY. 227 

towed doganiere, our driver became loqua- 
cious. 

"I am a good Catnolic, — better than 
most," said he, suddenly. 

" What do you mean by that ? " 

" Eh ! they say Saint Peter wrought mira- 
cles, and there are enough who don't believe 
it ; but I do. There 's the Barberini Pal- 
ace, — behold one miracle of Saint Peter ! 
There 's the Farnese, — behold another ! 
There 's the Borghese, — behold a third ! 
But there 's no end of them. No saint, nor 
all the saints put together, ever worked so 
many wonders as he ; and then, per Bacco ! 
he is the uncle of so many folks, — why, 
that 's a miracle in itself, and of the great- 
est ! " 

Presently he added : " Do you know how 
we shall treat the priests when we make our 
next revolution ? We shall treat them as 
they treat us, and that is after the fashion 
of the buffalo. For the buffalo is not content 
with getting a man down, but after that he 



228 ITALY. 

gores him and thrusts him, always, always, 
as if he wished to cram him to the centre of 
the earth. Ah, if I were only keeper of 
hell-gate ! Not a rascal of them all should 
ever get out into purgatory while I stood at 
the door ! " 

We remonstrated a little, but it only exas- 
perated him the more. 

" Blood of Judas ! they will eat nothing 
else than gold, when a poor fellow's belly is 
as empty as San Lorenzo yonder. They '11 
have enough of it one of these days — but 
melted ! How do you think they will like 
it for soup ? " 

Perhaps, if our vehicle had been blessed 
with springs, our vetturino would have been 
more placable. I confess a growing morose- 
ness in myself, and a wandering speculation 
or two as to the possible fate of the builaer 
j)f our chariot in the next world. But I 
am more and more persuaded every day, that, 
as far as the popular mind is concerned, Ro» 
manism is a dead thing in Italy. It sur« 



ITALY. 229 

vives only because there is nothing else to 
replace it with, for men must wear their old 
habits (however threadbare and out at the 
elbows) till they get better. It is literally a 
superstition, — a something left to stand over 
till the great commercial spirit of the nine- 
teenth century balances his accounts again, 
and then it will be banished to the limbo of 
profit and loss. The Papacy lies dead in 
the Vatican, but the secret is kept for the 
present, and government is carried on in its 
name. After the fact gets abroad, perhaps 
its ghost will terrify men a little while longer, 
but only while they are in the dark, though 
the ghost of a creed is a hard thing to give 
a mortal wound to, and may be laid, after all, 
only in a Red Sea of blood. 

So we rattled along till we came to a large 
albergo just below the village of Colon na. 
While our horse was taking his rinfresco, we 
climbed up to it, and found it desolate enough, 
•—the houses never rebuilt since Consul Bienzi 
Backed it five hundred years ago. It was a 



230 ITALY. 

kind of gray incrustation on the top of the 
hill, chiefly inhabited by pigs, chickens, and 
an old woman with a distaff, who looked as 
sacked and ruinous as everything around her. 
There she sat in the sun, a dreary, doting 
Clotho, who had outlived her sisters, and span 
endless destinies which none was left to cut at 
the appointed time. Of course she paused 
from her work a moment, and held out a 
skinny hand, with the usual, " Noblest gentle- 
men, give me something for charity." We 
gave her enough to pay Charon's ferriage 
across to her sisters, and departed hastily, for 
there was something uncanny about the place. 
In this climate even the finger-marks of Ruin 
herself are indelible, and the walls were still 
blackened with Rienzi's fires. 

As we waited for our carrettella, I saw four 
or five of the lowest-looking peasants come up 
and read the handbill of a tombola (a kind of 
lottery) which was stuck up beside the inn- 
dooi . One of them read it aloud for our ben- 
efit, and with remarkable propriety of accent 



ITALY. 231 

anJ emphasis. This benefit of clergy, how- 
ever, is of no great consequence where there 
is nothing to read. In Rome, this morning, 
the walls were spattered with placards con- 
demning the works of George Sand, Eugene 
Sue, Gioberti, and others. But in Rome one 
may contrive to read any book he likes ; and 
I know Italians who are familiar with Sweden- 
borg, and even Strauss. 

Our stay at the albergo was illustrated by 
one other event, — a nightingale singing in a 
full-blossomed elder-bush on the edge of a 
brook just across the road. So liquid were 
the notes, and so full of spring, that the twig 
he tilted on seemed a conductor through 
which the mingled magnetism of brook and 
blossom flowed into him and were precipitated 
in music. Nature understands thoroughly the 
value of contrasts, and accordingly a donkey 
from a shed hard by, hitched and hesitated 
and agonized through his bray, so that we 
might be conscious at once of the positive and 
negative poles of song. It was pleasant to see 



232 ITALY. 

with what undoubting enthusiasm he went 
through his solo, and vindicated Providence 
from the imputation of weakness in making 
such trifles as the nightingale yonder. " Give 
ear, O heaven and earth ! " he seemed to 
say, " nor dream that good, sound common- 
sense is extinct or out of fashion so long as 1 
live." I suppose Nature made the donkey 
half abstractedly, while she was feeling her 
way up to her ideal in the horse, and that his 
bray is in like manner an experimental sketch 
for the neigh of her finished animal. 

We drove on to Palestrina, passing for some 
distance over an old Roman road, as carriage- 
able as when it was built. Palestrina occu- 
pies the place of the once famous Temple of 
Fortune, whose ruins are perhaps a fitter mon- 
ument of the fickle goddess than ever the per« 
feet fane w T as. 

Come hither, weary ghosts that wail 

O'er buried Nimroud's carven walls, 
And ye whose nightly footsteps frail 

From the dread hush of Memphian halls 

Lead forth the whispering funerals ! 



ITALY. 233 

Come hither, shade of ancient pain 
That, muffled sitting, hear'st the foam 

To death-deaf Carthage shoat in vain, 
And thou that in the Sibyl's tome 
Tear-stain'st the never after Rome ! 

Come, Marius, Wolsey, all ye great 

On whom proud Fortune stamped her heel, 

And see herself the sport of Fate, 
Herself discrowned and made to feel 
The treason of her slippery wheel ! 

One climbs through a great part of the town 
by stone steps, passing fragments of Pelasgic 
wall, (for history, like geology, may be studied 
here in successive rocky strata,*) and at length 
reaches the inn, called the Cappellaro, the sign 
of which is a great tin cardinal's hat, swing- 
ing from a small building on the other side 
of the street, so that a better view of it may 
be had from the hostelry itself. The land- 
lady, a stout woman of about sixty years, wel- 
comed us heartily, and burst forth into an elo- 
quent eulogy on some fresh sea-fish which she 
had just received from Rnne. She promised 



\ 



234 ITALY. 

everything for dinner, leaving us to choose ; 
but as a skilful juggler flitters the cards before 
you, and, while he seems to offer all, forces 
upon you the one he wishes, so we found that 
whenever we undertook to select from her 
voluble bill of fare, we had in some unaccount- 
able manner always ordered sea-fish. There- 
fore, after a few vain efforts, we contented 
ourselves, and, while our dinner was cooking, 
climbed up to the top of the town. Here 
stands the deserted Palazzo Barberini, in 
which is a fine Roman mosaic pavement. It 
was a dreary old place. On the ceilings of 
some of the apartments w T ere fading out the 
sprawling apotheoses of heroes of the family, 
(themselves long ago faded utterly,) who 
probably went through a somewhat different 
ceremony after their deaths from that repre- 
sented here. One of the rooms on the ground- 
floor was still occupied, and from its huge 
grated windows there swelled and subsided at 
intervals a confused turmoil of voices, some 
talking, some singing, some swearing, and 



ITALY. 235 

lome lamenting, as if a page of Dante's In- 
ferno had become suddenly alive under one's 
eye. This was the prison, and in front of 
each window a large stone block allowed tete 
d-tete discourses between the prisoners and 
their friends outside. Behind the palace rises 
a steep, rocky hill, with a continuation of 
ruined castle, the' innocent fastness now of 
rooks and swallows. We walked down to a 
kind of terrace, and watched the Alban Mount 
(which saw the sunset for us by proxy) till 
the bloom trembled nearer and nearer to its 
summit, then went wholly out, we could not 
say when, and day was dead. Simultaneously 
we thought of dining, and clattered hastily 
down to the Cappellaro. We had to wait yet 
half an hour for dinner, and from where I sat 
I could see through the door of the dining- 
room a kind of large hall into which a door 
from the kitchen also opened. Presently 1 
saw the landlady come out with a little hang- 
ing lamp in her hand, and seat herself amply 
before a row of basket? ranged upside-down 



236 ITALY. 

along the wall. She carefully lifted the edge 
of one of these, and, after she had groped in 
it a moment, I heard that hoarse choking 
scream peculiar to fowls when seized by the 
leg in the dark, as if their throats were in 
their tibiae after sunset. She took out a fine 
young cock and set him upon his feet before 
her, stupid with sleep, and blinking helplessly 
at the lamp, which he perhaps took for a sun 
in reduced circumstances, doubtful whether to 
crow or cackle. She looked at him admir- 
ingly, felt of him, sighed, gazed sadly at his 
coral crest, and put him back again. This 
ceremony she repeated with five or six of the 
baskets, and then went back into the kitchen. 
I thought of Thessalian hags and Arabian en- 
chantresses, and wondered if these were trans- 
formed travellers, — for travellers go through 
queer transformations sometimes. Should 
Storg and I be crowing and scratching to- 
morrow morning, instead of going to Subiaco ? 
Should we be Plato's men, with the feathers, 
instead of without them ? I would probe thw 



ITALY. 237 

mystery. So, when the good woman came in 
to lay the table, I asked what she had been 
doing with the fowls. 

-' I thought to kill one for the gentlemen's 
soup ; but they were so beautiful my heart 
failed me. Still, if the gentlemen wish it — 
only I thought two pigeons would be more 
delicate." 

Of course we declined to be accessory to 
such a murder, and she went off delighted, 
returning in a few minutes with our dinner. 
First we had soup, then a roasted kid, then 
boiled pigeons, (of which the soup had been 
made,) and last the pesci di mare, which were 
not quite so great a novelty to us as to our 
good hostess. However, hospitality, like so 
many other things, is reciprocal, and the guest 
must bring his half, or it is naught. The 
prosperity of a dinner lies in the heart of him 
that eats it, and an appetite twelve miles long 
enabled us to do as g?^eat justice to the fish as 
if we were crowding all Lent into our meal. 
The landlady came and sat by us ; a large and 



£38 ITALY. 

serious cat, winding her great tail around her, 
settled herself comfortably on the table, lick- 
ing her paws now and then, with a poor re- 
lation's look at the fish ; a small dog sprang 
into an empty chair, and a large one, with 
very confidential manners, would go from one 
to the other of us, laying his paw upon our 
arms as if he had an important secret to com- 
municate, and alternately pricking and droop- 
ing his ears in hope or despondency. The al- 
bergatriee forthwith began to tell us her story, 
— how she was a widow, how she had borne 
thirteen children, twelve still living, and how 
she received a pension of sixty scudi a year, 
under the old Roman law, for her meritorious- 
ness in this respect. The portrait of the son 
she had lost hung over the chimney-place, and, 
pointing to it, she burst forth into the follow- 
ing droll threnody. The remarks in paren- 
thesis were screamed through the kitchen- 
tloor, which stood ajar, or addressed personally 
to us. 
" O my son, my son I the doctors killed 



ITALY. 239 

hiiii, just as truly as if they had poisoned him ! 
how beautiful he was! beautiful! beauti- 
ful ! ! beautiful ! ! ! (Are not those fish 
done yet?) Look, that is his likeness, — but 
he was handsomer. He was as big as that " 
(extending her arms), — " big breast, big 
shoulders, big sides, big legs ! (Eat 'em, eat 
'em, they won't hurt you, fresh sea-fish, fresh I 
fresh! ! fresh ! ! !) I told them the doctors 
had murdered him, when they carried him 
with torches ! He had been hunting, and 
brought home some rabbits, I remember, for 
he was not one that ever came empty-handed, 
and got the fever, and you treated him for 
consumption, and killed him ! (Shall I come 
out there, or will you bring some more fish?) " 
So she went on, talking to herself, to us, to 
the little serva in the kitchen, and to the 
medical profession in general, repeating every 
epithet three times, with increasing emphasis, 
till her voice rose to a scream, and contriving 
to mix up her livirg children with her dead 
vne, the fish, the doctors, the serva, and the 



240 ITALY. 

rabbits, till it was hard to say whether it was 
the fish that had large legs, whether the doc- 
tors had killed them, or the serva had killed 
the doctors, and whether the hello ! hello ! I 
hello ! ! ! referred to her son or a particularly 
fine rabbit. 

25th. — Having engaged our guide and 
horses the night before, we set out betimes 
this morning for Olevano. From Palestrina 
to Cavi the road winds along a narrow valley, 
following the course of a stream which rustles 
rather than roars below. Large chestnut-trees 
lean every way on the steep sides of the hills 
above us, and at every opening we could see 
great stretches of Campagna rolling away and 
away toward the bases of purple mountains 
ttreaked with snow. The sides of the road 
were drifted with heaps of wild hawthorn and 
honeysuckle in full bloom, and bubbling with 
innumerable nightingales that sang unseen. 
Overhead the sunny sky tinkled with larks, as 
if the frost in the air were breaking up anq 
whirling away on the swollen currents of 
ipring. 



ITALY. 241 

Before long we overtook a little old man 
hobbling toward Cavi, with a bag upon his 
back. This was the mail ! Happy country, 
which Hurry and Worry have not yet subju- 
gated ! Then we clattered up and down the 
narrow paved streets of Cavi, through the 
market-place, full of men dressed all alike in 
blue jackets, blue breeches, and white stock- 
ings, who do not stare at the strangers, and 
so out at the farther gate. Now oftener and 
oftener we meet groups of peasants in gayest 
dresses, ragged pilgrims with staff and scallop, 
singing (horribly) ; then processions with bag- 
pipes and pipes in front, droning and squeal- 
ing (horribly) ; then strings of two-wheeled 
carts, eight or nine in each, and in the first 
the priest, book in hand, setting the stave, and 
all singing (horribly). This must be inquired 
into. Gigantic guide, who, splendid with blue 
sash and silver knee-buckles, has contrived, by 
incessant drumming with his heels, to get his 
mule in front, is hailed. 

11 p 



242 ITALY. 

" Ho, Petruccio, what is the meaning of all 
this press of people ? " 

" Festa, Lordship, at Genezzano." 

"What festa 9" 

" Of the Madonna, Lordship," and touches 
his hat, for they are all dreadfully afraid of 
her for some reason or other. 

We are in luck, this being the great festa 
of the year among the mountains, — a thing 
which people go out of Rome to see. 

44 Where is Genezzano ? " 

" Just over yonder, Lordship," and pointed 
to the left, where was what seemed like a 
monstrous crystallization of rock on the crown 
of a hill, with three or four taller crags of 
castle towering in the midst, and all gray, ex 
cept the tiled roofs, whose wrinkled sides were 
gold-washed with a bright yellow lichen, as 
if ripples, turned by some spell to stone, had 
contrived to detain the sunshine with which 
they were touched at the moment of trans* 
formation. 

The road, wherever it came into sight, 



ITALY. 243 

burned with brilliant costumes, like an illu- 
minated page of Froissart. Gigantic guide 
meanwhile shows an uncomfortable and fidg- 
ety reluctance to turn aside and enter fairy- 
land, which is wholly unaccountable. Is the 
huge earthen creature an Afrite, under sacred 
pledge to Solomon, and in danger of being 
sealed up again, if he venture near the festival 
of our Blessed Lady ? If so, that also were 
a ceremony worth seeing, and we insist. He 
wriggles and swings his great feet with an evi- 
dent impulse to begin kicking the sides of his 
mule again and fly. The w T ay over the hills 
from Genezzano to Olevano he pronounces 
seomodissima, demanding of every peasant who 
goes by if it be not entirely impassable. This 
leading question, put in all the tones of plausi- 
ble entreaty he can command, meets the in- 
variable reply, " JE scomoda, davvero ; ma per 
le bestie — eh!" (it is bad, of a truth, but for 
the beasts — eh !) and then cne of those inde- 
icribable shrugs, unintelligible at first as the 
tompass to a savage, but in which the expert 



244 ITALl. 

can make twenty hair's-breadth distinctions 
between N. E. and N. N. E. 

Finding that destiny had written it on his 
forehead, the guide at last turned and went 
cantering and kicking toward Genezzano, we 
following. Just before you reach the town, 
the road turns sharply to the right, and, cross- 
ing a little gorge, loses itself in the dark 
gateway. Outside the gate is an open space, 
which formicated with peasantry in every 
variety of costume that was not Parisian. 
Laughing women were climbing upon their 
horses (which they bestride like men) ; pil- 
grims were chanting, and beggars (the howl 
of an Italian beggar in the country is some- 
thing terrible) howling in discordant rivalry. 
It was a scene lively enough to make Hera- 
clitus shed a double allowance of tears ; but 
our giant was still discomforted. As soon as 
we had entered the gate, he dodged into a 
'ittle back-street, just as we were getting out 
of which the mystery of his unwillingness 
was cleared up. He had been endeavoring 



ITALY. 245 

to avoid a creditor. But it so chanced (as 
Fate can hang a man with even a rope of 
Band) that the enemy was in position just at 
the end of this very lane, where it debouched 
into the Piazza of the town. 

The disputes of Italians are very droll things, 
and I will accordingly bag the one which is 
now imminent, as a specimen. They quarrel 
as unaccountably as dogs, who put their noses 
together, dislike each other's kind of smell, 
and instantly tumble one over the other, with 
noise enough to draw the eyes of a whole 
street. So these people burst out, without 
apparent preliminaries, into a noise and fury 
and war-dance which would imply the very 
utmost pitch and agony of exasperation. And 
the subsidence is as sudden. They explode 
each other on mere contact, as if by a law of 
nature, like two hostile gases. They do not 
grow warm, but leap at once from zero to some 
degree of white-heat, to indicate which no 
Anglo-Saxon thermometer of wrath is highly 
wiough graduated. If I were asked to name 



249 ITALY. 

• 

one universal characteristic of an Italian town, 
I should say, two men clamoring and shak- 
ing themselves to pieces at each other, and a 
woman leaning lazily out of a window, and 
perhaps looking at something else. Till one 
gets used to this kind of thing, one expects 
some horrible catastrophe ; but during eight 
months in Italy I have only seen blows ex- 
changed thrice. In the present case the ex- 
plosion was of harmless gunpowder. 

" Why-haven't-you-paid-those-fifty-five-ba- 
jocchi-git-ihe-jnzzicarolo' s ? " began the adver- 
sary, speaking with such inconceivable rapidity 
that he made only one word, nay, as it seemed, 
one monosyllable, of the whole sentence. Our 
giant, with a controversial genius which I 
should not have suspected in him, immedi- 
ately, and with great adroitness, changed the 
ground of dispute, and, instead of remaining 
an insolvent debtor, raised himself at once ta 
the ethical position of a moralist, resisting an 
injust demand from principle. 

" It was only forty-five" roared he. 



ITALY. 247 

" But I say^/i/fy-five," screamed the other, 
and shook his close-cropped head as a boy 
does an apple on the end of a switch, as if he 
meant presently to jerk it off at his antago- 
nist. 

" Birbone!" yelled the guide, gesticulating 
so furiously with every square inch of his pon- 
derous body that I thought he would throw 
his mule over, the poor beast standing all the 
while with drooping head and ears while the 
thunders of this man-quake burst over him. 
So feels the tortoise that sustains the globe 
when earth suffers fiery convulsions. 

"Birbante!" retorted the creditor, and the 
opprobrious epithet clattered from between his 
shaking jaws as a refractory copper is rattled 
out of a Jehoiada-box by a child. 

"Andate vi far f rigger e ! '" howled giant. 

"Andate ditto, ditto!" echoed creditor, — 
and behold, the thing is over ! The giant 
promises to attend to the affair when he comes 
back, the creditor returns to his booth, and 
we ride on. 



248 ITALY. 

Speaking of Italian quarrels, I am tempted 
to parenthesize here another which I saw at 
Civita Vecchia. We had been five days on 
our way from Leghorn in a French steamer, 
a voyage performed usually, I think, in about 
thirteen hours. It was heavy weather, blow- 
ing what a sailor would call half a gale of 
wind, and the caution of our captain, not to 
call it fear, led him to put in for shelter first 
at Porto Ferrajo in Elba, and then at Santo 
Stefano on the Italian coast. Our little black 
water-beetle of a mail-packet was knocked 
about pretty well, and all the Italian passen« 
gers disappeared in the forward cabin before 
we were out of port. When we were fairly 
at anchor within the harbor of Civita Vecchia, 
they crawled out again, sluggish as winter 
flies, their vealy faces mezzotinted with soot. 
One of them presently appeared in the custom- 
house, his only luggage being a cage closely 
covered with a dirty red handkerchief, wl " *• 
represented his linen. 

" What have you in the cage ? " asked 



ITALY. 249 

" Eh ! nothing other than a parrot." 
"There is a duty of one scudo and one 
bajoccho, then." 

" Santo diavolo ! but what hoggishness ! " 
Thereupon instant and simultaneous blow- 
up, or rather a series of explosions, like those 
in honor of a Neapolitan saint's-day, lasting 
about ten minutes, and followed by as sudden 
quiet. In the course of it, the owner of the 
bird, playing irreverently on the first half of 
its name (poppagallo), hinted that it would be 
a high duty for his Holiness himself (Papa). 
After a pause for breath, he said quietly, as 
if nothing had happened, "Very good, then, 
since I must pay, I will," and began fum- 
bling for the money. 

" Meanwhile, do me the politeness to show 
me the bird," said the officer. 

" With all pleasure," and, lifting a corner 
of the handkerchief, there lay the object of 
dispute on his back, stone-dead, with his claws 
curled up helplessly on each side his breast. 
I believe the owner wuuid have been pleased 
11* 



250 ITALY. 

had it even been his grandmother who had 
thus evaded duty, so exquisite is the pleasure 
of an Italian in escaping payment of any- 
thing. 

" I make a present of the poor bird," said 
he blandly. 

The publican, however, seemed to feel that 
he had been somehow cheated, and I left them 
in high debate, as to whether the bird were 
dead when it entered the custom-house, and, 
if it had been, whether a dead parrot were 
dutiable. Do not blame me for being enter- 
tained and trying to entertain you with these 
trifles. I remember Virgil's stern 

" Che per poco e che teco non mi risso," 

but Dante's journey was of more import to 
himself and others than mine. 

I am struck by the freshness and force of 
the passions in Europeans, and carrot help 
feeling as if there were something beai'hy in 
it. When I think of the versatile and ao. 
commodating habits of America, it seems like 



ITALY. 251 

a land without thunder-storms. In proportion 
as man grows commercial, does he also be- 
come dispassionate and incapable of electric 
emotions ? The driving-wheels of all-powerful 
nature are in the back of the head, and, as 
man is the highest type of organization, so a 
nation is better or worse as it advances toward 
the highest type of man, or recedes from it. 
But it is ill with a nation when the cerebrum 
sucks the cerebellum dry, for it cannot live 
by intellect alone. The broad foreheads al- 
ways carry the day at last, but only when 
they are based on or buttressed with massive 
hind-heads. It would be easier to make a 
people great in whom the animal is vigorous, 
than to keep one so after it has begun to spin- 
dle into over-intellectuality. The hands that 
have grasped dominion and held it have been 
large and hard ; those from which it has slipped, 
delicate, and apt for the lyre and the pen- 
cil. Moreover, brain is always to be bought, 
but passion never comes to market. On the 
Kdiole, I am rather inclined to like this Euro- 




252 ITALY. 

pean impatience and fire, even while I laugh 
at it, and sometimes find myself surmising 
whether a people who, like the Americans, 
put up quietly with all sorts of petty personal 
impositions and injustices, will not at length 
find it too great a bore to quarrel with great 
public wrongs. 

Meanwhile, I must remember that I am in 
Genezzano, and not in the lecturer's desk. 
We walked about for an hour or two, ad- 
miring the beauty and grand bearing of the 
women, and the picturesque vivacity and ever- 
renewing unassuetude of the whole scene. 
Take six of the most party-colored dreams, 
break them to pieces, put them into a fantasy- 
kaleidoscope, and when you look through it 
you will see something that for strangeness, 
vividness, and mutability looked like the little 
Piazza of Genezzano seen from the church 
porch. As we wound through the narrow 
streets again to the stables where we had lef* 
our horses, a branch of laurel cr ilex wouli, 
mark a wine-shop, and, looking till our eye 



ITALY. 253 

cooled and toned itself down to dusky sympa- 
thy with the crypt, we could see the smoky 
interior sprinkled with white head-cloths and 
scarlet bodices, with here and there a yellow 
spot of lettuce or the red inward gleam of a 
wine-flask. The head-dress is precisely of that 
most ancient pattern seen on Egyptian statues, 
and so colossal are many of the wearers, that 
you might almost think you saw a party of 
young sphinxes carousing in the sunless core 
of a pyramid. 

We remounted our beasts, and, for about a 
mile, cantered gayly along a fine road, and 
then turned into a by-path along the flank of 
a mountain. Here the guide's strada scomo- 
dissima began, and we were forced to dis- 
mount, and drag our horses downward for a 
mile or two. We crossed a small plain in the 
ralley, and then began to climb the opposite 
Ascent. The path was perhaps four feet broad, 
and was paved with irregularly shaped blocks 
of stone, which, having been raised and low- 
rred, tipped, twisted, undermined, and gener- 



254 ITALY. 

ally capsized by the rains and frosts of centu- 
ries, presented the most diabolically ingenious 
traps and pit-falls. All the while the scenery 
was beautiful. Mountains of every shape and 
hue changed their slow outlines ever as we 
moved, now opening, now closing around us, 
sometimes peering down solemnly at us over 
each other's shoulders, and then sinking slowly 
out of sight, or, at some sharp turn of the path, 
seeming to stride into the valley and confront 
us with their craggy challenge, — a challenge 
which the little valleys accepted, if we did not, 
matching their rarest tints of gray and brown, 
and pink and purple, or that royal dye to 
make which all these were profusely melted 
together for a moment's ornament, with as 
many shades of various green and yellow. 
Gray towns crowded and clung on the tops 
of peaks that seemed inaccessible. We owe 
a great deal of picturesqueness to the quarrels 
and thieveries of the barons of the Middle 
Ages. The traveller and artist should put 
up a prayer for their battered old souls. I 



ITALY. 255 

was to be out of their way and that of the 
Saracens that people were driven to make 
their homes in spots so sublime and incon- 
venient that the eye alone finds it pleasant 
to climb up to them. Nothing else but an 
American land-company ever managed to in- 
duce settlers upon territory of such uninhab- 
itable quality. I have seen an insect that 
makes a mask for himself out of the lichens 
of the rock over which he crawls, contriving 
so to deceive the birds ; and the towns in this 
wild region would seem to have been built on 
the same principle. Made of the same stone 
with the cliffs on which they perch, it asks 
good eyesight to make them out at the dis- 
tance of a few miles, and every wandering 
mountain-mist annihilates them for the mo- 
ment. 

At intervals, I couid hear the giant, after 
digging at the sides of his mule with his spur- 
less heels, growling to himself, and imprecat- 
ing an apoplexy (accidente) upon the path and 
him who made it. This is the universal male. 



256 ITALY. 

diction here, and once it was put into rhyme 
for my benefit. I was coming down the rus- 
ty steps of San Gregorio one day, and hav- 
ing paid no heed to a stout woman of thirty 
odd who begged somewhat obtrusively, she 
screamed after me, 

" Ah, vi pigli un accidente, 
Voi che non date niente ! " 

Ah, may a sudden apoplexy, 

You who give not, come and vex ye ! 

Our guide could not long appease his mind 
with this milder type of objurgation, but soon 
intensified it into accidentaccio, which means 
a selected apoplexy of uncommon size and 
ugliness. As the path grew worse and worse, 
so did the repetition of this phrase (for he 
was slow of invention) become more frequent, 
till at last he did nothing but kick and curse, 
mentally, I have no doubt, including us in his 
malediction. I think it would have gratified 
Longinus r Fuseli (both of whom commended 
swearing) :o have heard him. Before long 
we turned the flank of the hill by a littte 



ITALY. 257 

shrine of the Madonna, and there was Olevano 
just above us. Like the other towns in this 
district, it was the diadem of an abrupt peak 
of rock. From the midst of it jutted the ruins 
of an old stronghold of the Colonna. Proba- 
bly not a house has been built in it for cen- 
turies. To enter the town, we literally rode 
up a long flight of stone steps, and soon found 
ourselves in the Piazza. We stopped to buy 
some cigars, and the zigararo, as he rolled 
them up, asked if we did not want dinner. 
We told him we should get it at the inn. 
Benissimo, he would be there before us. What 
he meant, we could not divine ; but it turned 
out that he was the landlord, and that the 
inn only became such when strangers arrived, 
relapsing again immediately into a private 
dwelling. We found our host ready to receive 
us, and went up to a large room on the first 
floor. After due instructions, we seated our- 
selves at the open windows, — Storg to sketch, 
and I to take a mental calotype of the view. 
A.mong the many lovelj ones of the day, thia 



258 ITALY. 

was the loveliest, — or was it only that the 
charm of repose was added ? On our right 
was the silent castle, and beyond it the silent 
mountains. To the left we looked down over 
the clustering houses upon a cam pagna- val- 
ley of peaceful cultivation, vineyards, olive- 
orchards, grain-fields in their earliest green, 
and dark stripes of new-ploughed earth, over 
which the cloud-shadows melted tracklessly 
toward the hills which round softly upward 
to Monte Cavi. 

When our dinner came, and with it a flask 
of drowsy red Aleatico, like ink with a sus- 
picion of life-blood in it, such as one might 
fancy Shakespeare to have dipped his quill 
in, we had our table so placed that the satis- 
faction of our hunger might be dissensual- 
ized by the view from the windows. Many 
a glutton has eaten up farms and woodlands 
and pastures, and so did we, aesthetically, 
saucing our frittata and flavoring our Ale- 
atico w T ith landscape. It is a fine thing when 
^e can accustom our animal appetites to good 



ITALY. 259 

society, when body and soul (like master and 
Bervant in an Arab tent) sit down together 
at the same board. This thought is forced 
upon one very often in Italy, as one picnics 
in enchanted spots, where Imagination and 
Fancy play the parts of the unseen waiters 
in the fairy-story, and serve us with course 
after course of their ethereal dishes. Sense 
is satisfied with less and simpler food when 
sense and spirit are fed together, and the 
feast of the loaves and fishes is spread for 
us anew. If it be important for a state to 
educate its lower classes, so is it for us per- 
sonally to instruct, elevate, and refine our 
senses, the lower classes of our private body- 
politic, and which, if left to their own brute 
instincts, will disorder or destroy the whole 
commonwealth with flaming insurrection. 

After dinner came our guide to be paid. 
He, too, had had hhfrittata and his fiasco (or 
two), and came back absurdly comic, remind- 
ing one of the giant who was so taken in 
by the little tailor. He was not in the least 



260 ITALY. 

tipsy ; but the wine had excited his poor wits, 
whose destiny it was (awkward servants as 
they were !) to trip up and tumble over each 
other in proportion as they became zealous. 
He was very anxious to do us in some w r ay or 
other ; he only vaguely guessed how, but felt 
so gigantically good-natured that he could not 
keep his face sober long enough. It is quite 
clear why the Italians have no word but red- 
tare to express acting, for their stage is no 
more theatric than their street, and to exag- 
gerate in the least would be ridiculous. We 
graver-tempered and -mannered Septentrions 
must give the pegs a screw or two to bring 
our spirits up to nature's concert-pitch. Stcrg 
and I sat enjoying the exhibition of our giant, 
as if we had no more concern in it than as a 
comedy. It was nothing but a spectacle to 
us, at which we were present as critics, while 
he inveighed, expostulated, argued, and be* 
sought, in a breath. Finding all his attempts 
miscarry, or resulting in nothing more solid 
than applause, he said, "Forse non capiscono? 9 



ITALY. 261 

(Perhaps you don't undei stand?) "Capis- 
tono pur y troppo" (They understand only too 
well,) replied the landlord, upon which terrce 
filius burst into a laugh, and began begging 
for more buonamano. Failing in this, he tight- 
ened his sash, offered to kiss our lordships' 
hands, an act of homage which we declined, 
and departed, carefully avoiding Genezzano 
on his return, I make no doubt. 

We paid our bill, and went down to the 
door, where we found our guides and don- 
keys, the host's handsome wife and handsomer 
daughter, with two of her daughters, and a 
crowd of women and children waiting to wit- 
ness the exit of the foreigners. We made all 
the nfothers and children happy by a discrimi- 
nating largesse of copper among the little ones. 
They are a charming people, the natives of 
these out-of-the-way Italian towns, if kindness, 
courtesy, and good looks make people charm- 
Ug. Our beards and felt hats, which make 
us pass for artists, were our passports to the 
warmest welcome and the best cheer eveiy- 



262 ITALY. 

where. Reluctantly we mounted our don- 
keys, and trotted away, our guides (a man 
and a boy) running by the flank (true hench- 
men, haunchmen, flanquiers or flunkeys) and 
inspiring the little animals with pokes in the 
side, or with the even more effectual ahrrrrrrr! 
Is there any radical affinity between this roll- 
ing fire of r's and the word arra, which means 
hansel or earnest-money? The sound is the 
same, and has a marvellous spur-power over 
the donkey, who seems to understand that full 
payment of goad or cudgel is to follow. I 
have known it to move even a Sicilian mule, 
the least sensitive and most obstinate of crea- 
tures with ears, except a British church-war- 
den. * 

We wound along under a bleak hill, more 
desolate than anything I had ever seen. The 
old gra^ rocks seemed not to thrust themselves 
out of the rusty soil, but rather to be stabbed 
into it, as if they had been hailed down upon 
it by some volcano. There was nearly as much 
look of design as there is in a druidical circle 



ITALY. 263 

and the whole looked like some graveyard in 
an extinguished world, the monument of mor- 
tality itself, such as Bishop Wilkins might have 
found in the moon, if he had ever got thither. 
The path grew ever wilder, and Rojate, the 
next town we came to, grim and grizzly, under 
a grim and grizzly sky of low-trailing clouds, 
which had suddenly gathered, looked drearier 
even than the desolations we had passed. It 
was easy to understand why rocks should like 
to live here well enough ; but what could have 
brought men hither, and then kept them here, 
was beyond all reasonable surmise. Barren 
hills stood sullenly aloof all around, incapable 
»»f any crop but lichens. 

We entered the gate, and found ourselves 
in the midst of a group of wild-looking men 
gathered about the door of a wine-shop. 
Some of them were armed with long guns, 
and we saw (for the first time in situ) the 
tall bandit hat with ribbons wound round it, 
— such as one is familiar with in operas, and 
an the heads of those inhabitants of the Scali- 



264 ITALY. 

nata in Rome, who have a costume of their 
own, and placidly serve as models through 
the whole pictorial range of divine and hu- 
man nature, from the Padre Eterno to Ju- 
das. Twenty years ago, when my notion 
of an Italian was divided between a monk 
and a bravo, the first of whom did nothing 
but enter at secret doors and drink your 
health in poison, while the other lived be- 
hind corners, supporting himself by the pro- 
ductive industry of digging your person all 
over with a stiletto, I should have looked for 
instant assassination from these carousing ruf- 
fians. But the only blood shed on the occa- 
sion was that of the grape. A ride over the 
mountains for two hours had made us thirsty, 
*nd two or three bajocchi gave a tumbler of 
vino asciatto to all four of us. " You are 
welcome," said one of the men, " we are all 
artists after a fashion ; we are all brothers.' 
The manners here are more republican, ana 
the title of lordship disappears altogether. An- 
other came up and insisted that we should 



ITALY. 265 

drink a second flask of wine as his guests. 
In vain we protested ; no artist should pass 
through Rojate without accepting that token 
of good-will, and with the liberal help of our 
guides we contrived to gulp it down. He was 
for another ; but we protested that we were 
entirely full, and that it was impossible. I 
dare say the poor fellow would have spent a 
week's earnings on us, if we would have al- 
lowed it. We proposed to return the civility, 
and to leave a paul for them to drink a good 
journey to us after we were gone ; but they 
would not listen to it. Our entertainer fol- 
lowed us along to the Piazza, begging one of 
us to let him serve as donkey-driver to Su- 
biaco. When this was denied, he said that 
there was a festa here also, and that we must 
stop long enough to see the procession of zi- 
telle (young girls), which would soon begin. 
But evening was already gathering, the clouds 
grew momently darker, and fierce, damp gusts, 
striking us with the suddenr.ess of a blow, 
promised a wild night. We had still eight 

12 



ITALY. 

miles of mountain-path before us, and we 
struggled away. As we crossed the next 
summit beyond the town, a sound of chant- 
ing drifted by us on the wind, wavered hither 
and thither, now heard, now lost, then a doubt- 
ful something between song and gust, and, 
lingering a few moments, we saw the white 
head-dresses, gliding two by two, across a gap 
between the houses. The scene and the mu- 
sic were both in neutral tints, a sketch, as it 
were, in sepia a little blurred. 

Before long the clouds almost brushed us 
as they eddied silently by, and then it began 
to rain, first mistily, and then in thick, hard 
drops. Fortunately there was a moon, shin- 
ing placidly in the desert heaven above all 
this turmoil, or we could not have found our 
path, which in a few moments became a roar- 
ing torrent almost knee-deep. It was a cold 
rain, and far above us, where the mountain- 
peaks tore gaps in the clouds, we could see 
fche white silence of new-fallen snow. Some- 
times we had to dismount and wade, — a cir 



ITALY. 267 

cumstance which did not make our saddles 
more comfortable when we returned to them 
and could hear them go crosh, crosh, as the 
water gurgled out of them at every jolt. 
There was no hope of shelter nearer than Su- 
biaco, no sign of man, and no sound but the 
multitudinous roar of waters on every side. 
Rivulet whispered to rivulet, and water-fall 
shouted to water-fall, as they leaped from rock 
to rock, all hurrying to reinforce the main 
torrent below, which hummed onward toward 
the Anio with dilated heart. So gathered 
the hoarse Northern swarms to descend upon 
sunken Italy ; and so forever does physical 
and intellectual force seek its fatal equilibri- 
um, rushing in and occupying wherever it is 
drawn by the attraction of a lower level. 

We forded large streams that had been dry 
beds an hour before ; and so sudden was the 
creation of the floods, that it gave one almost 
as fresh a feeling of water as if one had been 
present in Eden when the first rock gave birth 
*o the first fountain. \ had a severe cold, I 



tQS ITALY. 

was wet through from the hips downward, 
and yet I never enjoyed anything more in my 
life, — so different is the shower-bath to which 
we doom ourselves from that whose string 
is pulled by the prison-warden compulsion. 
After our little bearers had tottered us up 
and down the dusky steeps of a few more 
mountain-spurs, where a misstep would have 
sent us spinning down the fathomless black 
nowhere below, we came out upon the high- 
road, and found it a fine one, as all the great 
Italian roads are. The rain broke off sud- 
denly, and on the left, seeming about half a 
mile away, sparkled the lights of Subiaco, flash- 
ing intermittently like a knot of fire-flies in a 
meadow. The town, owing to the necessary 
windings of the road, was still three miles off, 
and just as the guides had progued and ahrred 
the donkeys into a brisk joggle, I resolved to 
give up my saddle to the boy, and try Tom 
Coryate's compasses. It was partly out of 
numanity to myself and partly to him, for he 
was tired and I was cold. The elder guicU 



ITALY. 269 

and I took the lead, and, as I looked back, I 
laughed to see the lolling ears of Storg's don- 
key thrust from under his long cloak, as if he 
were coming out from a black Arab tent. 
We soon left them behind, and paused at a 
bridge over the Anio till we heard the patter 
of little hoofs again. The bridge is a single 
arch, bent between the steep edges of a gorge 
through which the Anio huddled far below, 
showing a green gleam here and there in the 
struggling moonlight, as if a fish rolled up his 
burnished flank. After another mile and a 
half, we reached the gate, and awaited our 
companions. It was dreary enough, — wait- 
ing always is, — and as the snow-chilled wind 
whistled through the damp archway where we 
stood, my legs illustrated feelingly to me how 
they cool water in the East, by wrapping the 
jars with wet woollen, and setting them in a 
draught. At last they came ; I remounted, 
and we went sliding through the steep, wet 
streets till we had fairly passed through the 
whole town. Before a long building of two 



270 ITALY. 

stories, without a symptom of past or future 
light, we stopped. " Ecco la Paletba!" said 
the guide, and began to pound furiously on the 
door with a large stone, which he some time 
before had provided for the purpose. After 
a long period of sullen unresponsiveness, we 
heard descending footsteps, light streamed 
through the chinks of the door, and the in- 
variable "Chief" which precedes the unbar- 
ring of all portals here, came from within. 
"Dueforestieri" answered the guide, and the 
bars rattled in hasty welcome. " Make us," 
we exclaimed, as we stiffly climbed down from 
our perches, " your biggest fire in your biggest 
chimney, and then we will talk of supper ! " 
In five minutes two great laurel-fagots were 
spitting and crackling in an enormous fire- 
place ; and Storg and I were in the costume 
which Don Quixote wore on the Brown Moun- 
tain. Of course there was nothing for supper 
but a frittata ; but there are worse things in 
the world than a frittata col prosciutto, and 
we discussed it like a society just emerging 



ITALY. 271 

from barbarism, the upper half of our persons 
presenting all the essentials of an advanced 
civilization, while our legs skulked under the 
table as free from sartorial impertinences as 
those of the noblest savage that ever ran wild 
in the woods. And so eccoci finalmente arri- 
vati! 

21th. — Nothing can be more lovely than 
the scenery about Subiaco. The town itself 
is built on a kind of cone rising from the 
midst of a valley abounding in olives and 
vines, with a superb mountain horizon around 
it, and the green Anio cascading at its feet. 
As you walk to the high-perched convent of 
San Benedetto, you look across the river on 
your right just after leaving the town, to a cliff 
over which the ivy pours in torrents, and in 
which dwellings have been hollowed out. In 
the black doorw r ay of every one sits a woman in 
BOarlet bodice and white head-gear, with a dis- 
taff, spinning, while overhead countless nightin- 
gales sing at once from the fringe of shrubbery. 
The glorious great white clou as look over the 



272 ITALY. 

mountain-tops into our enchanted valley, and 
sometimes a lock of their vapory wool would 
be torn off, to lie for a while in some inacces- 
sible ravine like a snow-drift ; but it seemed 
as if no shadow could fly over our privacy of 
sunshine to-day. The approach to the monas- 
tery is delicious. You pass out of the hot sun 
into the green shadows of ancient ilexes, lean- 
ing and twisting every way that is graceful, 
their branches velvety with brilliant moss, in 
which grow feathery ferns, fringing them with 
a halo of verdure. Then comes the convent, 
with its pleasant old monks, who show their 
sacred vessels (one by Cellini) and their relics, 
among which is a finger-bone of one of the 
Innocents. Lower down is a convent of San- 
ta Scolastica, where the first book was printed 
in Italy. 

But though one may have daylight till af- 
ter twenty-four o'clock in Italy, the days are 
no longer than ours, and I must go back tc 
La Paletta to see about a vettura to Tivoli 
[ leave Storg sketching, and walk slowly down, 



ITALY. 273 

lingering over the ever-changeful views, lin- 
gering opposite the nightingale-cliff, but get 
back to Subiaco and the vetturino at last. The 
growl of a thunder-storm soon brought Storg 
home, and we leave Subiaco triumphantly, at 
five o'clock, in a light carriage, drawn by three 
gray stallions (harnessed abreast) on the full 
gallop. I cannot describe our drive, the moun 
tain-towns, with their files of girls winding up 
from the fountain with balanced water-jars of 
ruddy copper, or chattering around it bright- 
hued as parrots, the ruined castles, the green 
gleams of the capricious river, the one great 
mountain that soaked up all the rose of sun- 
set, and, after all else grew dim, still glowed 
as if with inward fires, and, later, the white 
spray smoke of Tivoli that drove down the 
valley under a clear cold moon, contrasting 
strangely with the red glare of the lime- 
furnace on the opposite hillside. It is well 
that we can be happy sometimes without peep- 
ing and botanizing in the materials that make 
Us so. It is not ofter that we can escape the 
12* u 



274 ITALY. 

evil genius of analysis that haunts our mod- 
ern daylight of self-consciousness (wir haben 
ja aufgeklcirt!') and enjoy a day of right 
Chaucer. 

P. S. Now that I am printing this, a dear 
friend sends me an old letter, and says, " Slip 
in somewhere, by way of contrast, what you 
wrote me of your visit to Passawampscot." 
It is odd, almost painful, to be confronted 
with your past self and your past self's doings, 
when you have forgotten both. But here is 
my bit of American scenery, such as it is. 

While we were waiting for the boat, we 
had time to investigate P. a little. We wan- 
dered about with no one to molest us or make 
us afraid. No cicerone was lying in wait for 
us, no verger expected with funeral solemnity 
the more than compulsory shilling. I remem- 
ber the whole population of Cortona gathering 
round me, and beseeching me not to leave 
iheir city till I had seen the lampadone, whose 
keeper had unhappily gone out to walk, taking 



ITALY. 275 

the key with him. Thank Fortune, here were 
no antiquities, no galleries of Pre-Raphaelite 
art, every lank figure looking as if it had been 
stretched on a rack, before which the Anglo- 
Saxon writhes because he ought to like them 
and cannot for the soul of him. It is a pretty 
little village, cuddled down among the hills, 
the clay soil of which gives them, to a pilgrim 
from the parched gravelly inland, a look of al- 
most fanatical green. The fields are broad, 
and wholly given up to the grazing of cattle 
and sheep, which dotted them thickly in the 
breezy sunshine. The open doors of a barn, 
through which the wind flowed rustling the 
loose locks of the mow, attracted us. Swal- 
lows swam in and out with level wings, or 
crossed each other, twittering in the dusky 
mouth of their hay-scented cavern. Two or 
three hens and a cock (none of your gawky 
Shanghais, long-legged as a French peasant 
on his stilts, but the true red cock of the bal- 
lads, full-chested, coral-combed, fountain tailed) 
were inquiring for hay-seed in the background. 



276 ITALY. 

What frame in what gallery ever enclosed such 
a picture as is squared within the groundsel, 
side-posts, and lintel of a barn-door, whether 
for eye or fancy ? The shining floor suggests 
the flail-beat of autumn, that pleasantest of 
monotonous sounds, and the later husking- 
bee, where the lads and lasses sit round laugh- 
ingly busy under the swinging lantern. 

Here we found a fine, stalwart fellow shear- 
ing sheep. This was something new to us, 
and we watched him for some time with many 
questions, which he answered with off-hand 
good-nature. Going away, I thanked him for 
having taught me something. He laughed, 
and said, " Ef you '11 take off them gloves o' 
yourn, I '11 give ye a try at the practical part 
on 't." He was in the right of it. I never 
saw anything handsomer than those brown 
hands of his, on which the sinews stood out 
as he handled his shears, tight as a drawn bow- 
string. How much more admirable is this 
tawny vigor, the badge of fruitful toil, than 
the crop of early muscle that heads out undei 



ITALY. 27? 

me forcing-glass of the gymnasium ! Foreign- 
ers do not feel easy in America, because there 
are no peasants and underlings here to be hum- 
ble to them. The truth is, that none but those 
who feel themselves only artificially the supe- 
riors of our sturdy yeomen see in their self- 
respect any uncomfortable assumption of equal- 
ity. It is the last thing the yeoman is likely 
to think of. They do not like the " I say, ma 
good fellah " kind of style, and commonly con- 
trive to snub it. They do not value conde- 
scension at the same rate that he does who 
vouchsafes it to them. If it be a good thing 
for an English duke that he has no social su- 
periors, I think it can hardly be bad for a 
Yankee farmer. If it be a bad thing for the 
duke that he meets none but inferiors, it can- 
not harm the farmer much that he never has 
the chance. At any rate, there was no thought 
of incivility in my friend Hobbinol's jibe at 
pay kids, only a kind of jolly superiority. But 
I did not like to be taken for a city gent, so 
[ told him I was born and bred in the coun- 



278 ITALY. 

try as well as he. He laughed again, and 
said, " Wal, anyhow, I 've the advantage of 
ye, for you never see a sheep shore, an' I 've 
ben to the Opery and shore sheep myself into 
the bargain." He told me that there were 
two hundred sheep in the town, and that his 
father could remember when there were four 
times as many. The sea laps and mumbles 
the soft roots of the hills, and licks away an 
acre or two of good pasturage v^very season. 
The father, an old man of eighty, stood look- 
ing on, pleased with his son's wit, and brown 
as if the Passawampscot fogs were walnut- 
juice. 

We dined at a little tave.n, with a gilded 
bail hung out for sign, — a waif, I fancy, from 
some shipwreck. The landlady was a brisk, 
amusing little body, who soon informed us that 
her husband was own cousin to a Senator of 
the United States. A very elaborate sampler 
in the parlor, in which an obelisk was wept 
over by a somewhat costly willow in silver 
thread, recorded the virtues of the Senator'? 



ITALY. 279 

maternal grandfather and grandmother. Af- 
ter dinner, as we sat smoking our pipes on 
the piazza, our good hostess brought her little 
daughter, and made her repeat verses utterly 
unintelligible, but conjecturally moral, and cer- 
tainly depressing. Once set agoing, she ran 
down like an alarm-clock. We awaited her 
subsidence as that of a shower or other inevi- 
table natural phenomenon. More refreshing 
was the talk of a tall returned Californian, who 
told us, among other things, that " he should 
n't mind Panahmy's bein' sunk, oilers provid- 
in' there warn't none of our folks onto it when 
it went down ! " 

Our landlady's exhibition of her daughter 
puts me in mind of something similar, yet 
oddly different, which happened to Storg and 
me at Palestrina. We happened to praise 
the beauty of our stout locandiercCs little girl. 
"Ah, she is nothing to her elder sister just 
married," said the mother. " If you could 
see her! She is bella, bella, bella!" We 
thought no more of it ; but after dinner, the 



280 ITALY. 

good creature, with no warning but a tap at 
the door and a humble con permesso, brought 
her in all her bravery, and showed her off to 
us as simply and naturally as if she had been 
a picture. The girl, who was both beautiful 
and modest, bore it with the dignified aplomb 
of a statue. She knew we admired her, and 
liked it, but with the indifference of a rose. 
There is something very charming, I think, 
in this wholly unsophisticated consciousness, 
with no alloy of vanity or coquetry. 



A FEW BITS OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 

BYRON hit the white, which he often shot 
very wide of in his Italian Guide-Book, 
when he called Rome " my country." But it 
is a feeling which comes to one slowly, and 
is absorbed into one's system during a long 
residence. Perhaps one does not feel it till 
he has gone away, as things always seem fairer 
when we look back at them, and it is out of 
that inaccessible tower of the past that Long- 
ing leans and beckons. However it be, Fancy 
gets a rude shock at entering Rome, which it 
takes her a great while to get over. She has 
gradually made herself believe that she is ap- 
proaching a city of the dead, and has seen 
nothing on the road from Civita Vecchia to 
disturb that theory. Milestones, with "Via 
Aurelia" carved upon them, have confirmed 



282 A FEW BITS 

it. It is eighteen hundred years ago with 
her, and on the dial of time the shadow has 
not yet trembled over the line that marks the 
beginning of the first century. She arrives 
at the gate, and a dirty, blue man, with a 
cocked hat and a white sword-belt, asks for 
her passport. Then another man, as like the 
first as one spoon is like its fellow, and hav- 
ing, like him, the look of being run in a 
mould, tells her that she must go to the 
custom-house. It is as if a ghost, who had 
scarcely recovered from the jar of hearing 
Charon say, " I '11 trouble you for your obo- 
lus, if you please," should have his portman- 
teau seized by the Stygian tide-waiters to be 
searched. Is there anything, then, contra- 
band of death ? asks poor Fancy of herself. 
But it is the misfortune (or the safeguard) 
of the English mind that Fancy is always an 
outlaw, liable to be laid by the heels wherever 
Constable Common Sense can catch her. She 
Fubmits quietly as the postilion cries, "Yee* 
i$>!" and cracks his whip, and the rattle ove? 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 283 

the pavement begins, struggles a moment when 
the pillars of the colonnade stalk ghostly by 
in the moonlight, and finally gives up all for 
lost when she sees Bernini's angels polking on 
their pedestals along the sides of the Ponte 
Sant' Angelo with the emblems of the Passion 
in their arms. 

You are in Kome, of course ; the sbirro 
said so, the doganiere bowed it, and the pos- 
tilion swore it; but it is a Rome of modern 
houses, muddy streets, dingy caffes, cigar- 
smokers, and French soldiers, the manifest 
junior of Florence. And yet full of anachro- 
nisms, for in a little while you pass the col- 
umn of Antoninus, find the Dogana in an 
ancient temple whose furrowed pillars show 
through the recent plaster, and feel as if you 
saw the statue of Minerva in a Paris bonnet. 
You are driven to a hotel where all the bar- 
barian languages are spoken in one wild con- 
glomerate by the Commissionnaire, have your 
dinner wholly in French, and wake the next 
morning dreaming of the Tenth Legion, to see 



284 A FEW BITS 

a regiment of Chasseurs de Vtncennes trot- 
ting by. 

For a few days one undergoes a tremen- 
dous recoil. Other places have a distinct 
meaning. London is the visible throne of 
King Stock ; Versailles is the apotheosis of 
one of Louis XIV.'s cast periwigs ; Florence 
and Pisa are cities of the Middle Ages ; but 
Rome seems to be a parody upon itself. The 
ticket that admits you to see the starting of 
the horses at carnival, has S. P. Q. R. at the 
top of it, and you give the custode a paid for 
showing you the wolf that suckled Romulus 
and Remus. The Senatus seems to be a score 
or so of elderly gentlemen in scarlet, and 
the Populusque Romanus a swarm of nasty 
friars. 

But there is something more than mere 
earth in the spot where great deeds have been 
done. The surveyor cannot give the true di- 
mensions of Marathon or Lexington, for they 
are not reducible to square acres. Dead glory 
and greatness leave ghosts behind them, and 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 285 

jeparted empire has a metempsychosis, if 
nothing else has. Its spirit haunts the grave, 
and waits, and waits till at last it finds a body 
to its mind, slips into it, and historians moral- 
ize on the fluctuation of human affairs. By 
and by, perhaps, enough observations will have 
been recorded to assure us that these recur- 
rences are firmamental^ and historionomers 
will have measured accurately the sidereal 
years of races. When that is once done, 
events will move with the quiet of an orrery, 
and nations will consent to their peridynamis 
and apodynamis with planetary composure. 

Be this as it may, you become gradually 
aware of the presence of this imperial ghost 
imong the Roman ruins. You receive hints 
and startles of it through the senses first, as 
the horse always shies at the apparition before 
the rider can see it. Then, little by little, 
you become assured of it, and seem to hear 
the brush of its mantle through some hall of 
Caracalla's baths, or one jf those other soli- 
hides of Rome. And those solitudes are with 



286 A FEW BITS 

Dut a parallel ; for it is not the mere absence 
of man, but the sense of his departure, that 
makes a profound loneliness. Musing upcn 
them, you cannot but feel the shadow of that 
disembodied empire, and, remembering how 
the foundations of the Capitol were laid where 
a head was turned up, you are impelled to 
prophesy that the Idea of Rome will incarnate 
itself again as soon as an Italian brain is found 
large enough to hold it, and to give unity to 
those discordant members. 

But, though I intend to observe no regulai 
pattern in my Roman mosaic, which will re- 
semble more what one finds in his pockets 
after a walk, — a pagan cube or two from the 
palaces of the Caesars, a few Byzantine bits, 
given with many shrugs of secrecy by a lay- 
brother at San Paolo fuori le mura, and a few 
more (quite as ancient) from the manufactory 
Rt the Vatican, — it seems natural to begin 
what one has to say of Rome with something 
about St. Peter's ; for the saint sits at th« 
gate here as well as in Paradise. 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 287 

It is very common for people to say that 
they are disappointed in the first sight of St. 
Peter's ; and one hears much the same about 
Niagara. I cannot help thinking that the 
fault is in themselves ; and that if the church 
and the cataract were in the habit of giving 
away their thoughts with that rash generosity 
which characterizes tourists, they might per- 
haps say of their visitors, " Well, if you are 
those men of whom we have heard so much, 
we are a little disappointed, to tell the truth!" 
The refined tourist expects somewhat too 
much when he takes it for granted that St. 
Peter's will at once decorate him with the or- 
der of imagination, just as Victoria knights an 
alderman when he presents an address. Or 
perhaps he has been getting up a little archi- 
tecture on the road from Florence, and is dis- 
comfited because he does not know whether 
he ought to be pleased or not, which is very 
much as if he should wait to be told whether 
it was fresh water or salt which makes the 
exhaustless grace of Niagara s emerald curve, 



288 A FEW BITS 

before he benignly consented to approve It 
would be wiser, perhaps, for him to consider 
whether, if Michael Angelo had had the build- 
ing of him, his own personal style would not 
have been more impressive. 

It is not to be doubted that minds are of as 
many different orders as cathedrals, and that 
the Gothic imagination is vexed and discom- 
moded in the vain endeavor to flatten its pin- 
nacles, and fit itself into the round Roman 
arches. But if it be impossible for a man to 
like everything, it is quite possible for him to 
avoid being driven mad by what does not 
please him ; nay, it is the imperative duty of 
a wise man to find out what that secret is 
which makes a thing pleasing to another. In 
approaching St. Peter's, one must take his 
Protestant shoes off his feet, and leave them 
behind him, in the Piazza Rusticucci. Other- 
wise the great Basilica, with those outstretch- 
ing colonnades of Bramante, will seem to be 
a bloated spider lying in wait for him, the poor 
Reformed fly. As he lifts the heavy leathern 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 289 

flapper over the door, and is discharged into 
the interior by its impetuous recoil, let him 
disburden his mind altogether of stone and 
mortar, and think only that he is standing 
before the throne of a dynasty which, even 
in its decay, is the most powerful the world 
ever saw. Mason-work is all very well in it 
self, but it has nothing to do with the affair 
at present in hand. 

Suppose that a man in pouring down a glass 
of claret could drink the South of France, that 
he could so disintegrate the wine by the force 
of imagination as to taste in it all the clustered 
beauty and bloom of the grape, all the dance 
and song and sunburnt jollity of the vintage. 
Or suppose that in eating bread he could tran- 
substantiate it with the tender blade of spring, 
the gleam-flitted corn-ocean of summer, the 
royal autumn, with its golden beard, and the 
merry funerals of harvest. This is what the 
great poets do for us, we cannot tell now, with 
their fatally-chosen words, ci'owding the happy 
reins of language again with ali the life and 

13 8 



290 A FEW BITS 

meaning and music that had been dribbling 
away from them since Adam. And this is 
what the Roman Church does for religion, 
feeding the soul not with the essential re- 
ligious sentiment, not with a drop or two of 
the tincture of worship, but making us feel 
one by one all those original elements of which 
worship is composed ; not bringing the end to 
us, but making us pass over and feel beneath 
our feet all the golden rounds of the lad- 
der by which the climbing generations have 
reached that end ; not handing us drily a 
dead and extinguished Q. E. D., but letting 
it rather declare itself by the glory with which 
it interfuses the incense-clouds of wonder and 
aspiration and beauty in which it is veiled. 
The secret of her power is typified in the 
mystery of the Real Presence. She is the 
only church that has been loyal to the heart 
and soul of man, that has clung to her faith 
in the imagination, and that would not give 
over her symbols and images and sacred ves- 
lols to the perilous keeping of the iconoclast 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 291 

Understanding. She has never lost sight of 
the truth, that the product human nature is 
composed of the sum of flesh and spirit, and 
has accordingly regarded both this world and 
the next as the constituents of that other 
world which we possess by faith. She knows 
that poor Panza, the body, has his kitchen 
longings and visions, as well as Quixote, the 
soul, his ethereal, and has wit enough to sup- 
ply him with the visible, tangible raw mate- 
rial of imagination. She is the only poet 
among the churches, and, while Protestantism 
is unrolling a pocket surveyor's-plan, takes 
her votary to the pinnacle of her temple, and 
shows him meadow, upland, and tillage, cloudy 
heaps of forest clasped with the river's jew- 
elled arm, hillsides white with the perpetual 
snow of flocks, and, beyond all, the intermina- 
ble heave of the unknow T n ocean. Her empire 
may be traced upon the map by the bounda- 
ries of races ; the understanding is her great 
"oe ; and it is the people whose vocabulary 
was incomplete till they haa invented the arch* 



292 A FEW BITS 

word Humbug that defies her. With that 
leaden bullet John Bull can bring down Sen- 
timent when she flies her highest. And the 
more the pity for John Bull. One of these 
days some one whose eyes are sharp enough 
will read in the Times a standing advertise- 
ment, — "Lost, strayed, or stolen from the 
farm-yard of the subscriber the valuable horse 
Pegasus. Probably has on him part of a new 
plough-harness, as that is also missing. A 
suitable reward, etc. J. Bull." 

Protestantism reverses the poetical process 
I have spoken of above, and gives not even 
the bread of life, but instead of it the alcohol, 
or distilled intellectual result. This was very 
well so long as Protestantism continued to 
protest ; for enthusiasm sublimates the under- 
standing into imagination. But now that she 
also has become an establishment, she begins 
to perceive that she made a blunder in trust- 
ing herself to the intellect alone. She is be- 
ginning to feel her way back again, as one 
notices in Puseyism, and other such hints 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 293 

One is put upon reflection when he sees bur- 
ly Englishmen, who dine on beef and porter 
every day, marching proudly through Saint 
Peter's on Palm Sunday, with those fright- 
fully artificial palm-branches in their hands. 
Romanism wisely provides for the childish in 
men. 

Therefore I say again, that one must lay 
aside his Protestantism in order to have a true 
feeling of Saint Peter's. Here in Rome is the 
laboratory of that mysterious enchantress, who 
has known so well how to adapt herself to all 
the wants, or, if you will, the weaknesses of 
human nature, making the retirement of the 
convent-cell a merit to the solitary, the scourge 
or the fast a piety to the ascetic, the enjoy- 
ment of pomp and music and incense a relig- 
ious act in the sensual, and furnishing for the 
very soul itself a confidante in that ear of the 
dumb confessional, where it may securely dis- 
burden itself of its sins and sorrows. And 
the dome of St. Peter's is the magic circle 
within which she works her most potent in 



294 A FEW BITS 

cantations. I confess that I could not enter 
it alone without a kind of awe. 

But, setting entirely aside the effect of thia 
church upon the imagination, it is wonderful, 
if one consider it only materially. Michael 
Angelo created a new world in which every- 
thing was colossal, and it might seem that he 
built this as a fit temple for those gigantic 
figures with which he peopled it to worship 
in. Here his Moses should be high-priest, 
the service should be chanted by his prophets 
and sibyls, and those great pagans should be 
brought hither from San Lorenzo in Florence, 
to receive baptism. 

However unsatisfactory in other matters, 
statistics are of service here. I have seen a 
refined tourist who entered, Murray in hand, 
sternly resolved to have St. Peter's look small, 
brought to terms at once by being told that 
the canopy over the high altar (looking very 
like a four-post bedstead) was ninety-eight 
feet high. If he still obstinates himself, he is 
finished by being made to measure one of the 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 295 

marble putti, which look like rather stoutish 
babies, and are found to be six feet, every 
sculptor's son of them. This ceremony is the 
more interesting, as it enables him to satisfy 
the guide of his proficiency in the Italiau 
tongue by calling them putty at every con- 
venient opportunity. Otherwise both he and 
his assistant terrify each other into mutual 
unintelligibility with that lingua franca of the 
English-speaking traveller, which is supposed 
to bear some remote affinity to the French 
language, of which both parties are as igno- 
rant as an American Ambassador. 

Murray gives all these little statistical nudges 
to the Anglo-Saxon imagination ; but he know T s 
that its finest nerves are in the pocket, and 
accordingly ends by telling you how much the 
church cost. I forget how much it is ; but it 
cannot be more, I fancy, than the English 
national debt multiplied into itself three hun- 
dred and sixty-five times. If the pilgrim, 
honestly anxious for a sensation, will work out 
lliis little sum, he will be sure to receive &i\ 



296 A FEW BITS 

that enlargement of the imaginative faculty 
which arithmetic can give him. Perhaps the 
most dilating fact, after all, is that this archi- 
tectural world has also a separate atmosphere, 
distinct from that of Rome by some ten de- 
grees, and unvarying through the year. 

I think that, on the whole, Jonathan gets 
ready to be pleased with St. Peter's sooner 
than Bull. Accustomed to our lath and plas- 
ter expedients for churches, the portable sen- 
try-boxes of Zion, mere solidity and perma- 
nence are pleasurable in themselves ; and if 
he get grandeur also, he has Gospel measure. 
Besides, it is easy for Jonathan to travel. He 
is one drop of a fluid mass, who knows w 7 here 
his home is to-day, but can make no guess of 
where it may be to-morrow. Even in a form 
of government he only takes lodgings for the 
night, and is ready to pay his bill and be off 
in the morning. He should take his motto 
from Bishop Golias's "Mihi est proposition in 
tabernd mori" though not in the sufistic sense 
of that misunderstood Churchman. But Buh 






OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 297 

can seldom be said to travel at all, since the 
first step of a true traveller is out of himself. 
He plays cricket and hunts foxes on the Cam- 
pagna, makes entries in his betting-book while 
the Pope is giving his benediction, and points 
out Lord Calico to you awfully during the Sis- 
tine Miserere. If he let his beard grow, it 
always has a startled air, as if it suddenly re- 
membered its treason to Sheffield, and only 
makes him look more English than ever. A 
masquerade is impossible to him, and his fancy 
balls are the solemnest facts in the world. 
Accordingly, he enters St. Peter's with the 
dome of St. Paul's drawn tight over his eyes, 
like a criminal's cap, and ready for instant 
execution rather than confess that the English 
Wren had not a stronger wing than the Italian 
Angel. I like this in Bull, and it renders him 
the pleasantest of travelling-companions ; for 
he makes you take England along with you, 
and thus you have two countries at once. 
And one must not forget in an Italian inn 
what it is to Bull he owes the clean napkins 
13* 



298 A FEW BITS 

and sheets, and the privilege of his morning 
bath. Nor should Bull himself fail to remem 
ber that he ate with his fingers till the Italian 
gave him a fork. 

Browning has given the best picture of St. 
Peter's on a festival-day, sketching it with a 
few verses in his large style. And doubt- 
less it is the scene of the grandest spectacles 
which the world can see in these latter days. 
Those Easter pomps, where the antique world 
marches visibly before you in gilded mail and 
crimson doublet, refresh the eyes, and are good 
so long as they continue to be merely spectacle. 
But if one think for a moment of the servant 
of the servants of the Lord in cloth of gold, 
borne on men's shoulders, or of the children re- 
ceiving the blessing of their Holy Father, with 
a regiment of French soldiers to protect the fa- 
ther from the children, it becomes a little sad. 
If one would feel the full meaning of those 
ceremonials, however, let him consider the co- 
incidences between the Romish and the Bud- 
dhist forms of worship, and remembering that 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 299 

the Pope is the direct heir, through the Pon- 
tifex Maximus, of rites that were ancient when 
the Etruscans were modern, he will look with 
a feeling deeper than curiosity upon forms 
which record the earliest conquests of the In- 
visible, the first triumphs of mind over muscle. 

To me the noon silence and solitude of St. 
Peter's were most impressive, when the sun- 
light, made visible by the mist of the ever- 
burning lamps in which it was entangled, 
hovered under the dome like the holy dove 
goldenly descending. Very grand also is the 
twilight, when all outlines melt into myste- 
rious vastness, and the arches expand and lose 
themselves in the deepening shadow. Then, 
standing in the desert transept, you hear the 
far-off vespers swell and die like low breath- 
ings of the sea on some conjectured shore. 

As the sky is supposed to scatter its golden 
star-pollen once every year in meteoric show- 
ers, so the dome of St. Peter's has its annual 
efflorescence of fire. This illumination is the 
great show of Papal Rome. Just after sunset, 



600 A FEW BITS 

I stood upon the Trinity dei Mcnti and saw 
the little drops of pale light creeping down- 
ward from the cross and trickling over the 
dome. Then, as the sky darkened behind, 
it seemed as if the setting sun had lodged 
upon the horizon and there burned out, the 
fire still clinging to his massy ribs. And 
when the change from the silver to the golden 
illumination came, it was as if the breeze had 
fanned the embers into flame again. 

Bitten with the Anglo-Saxon gadfly that 
drives us all to disenchant artifice, and see the 
springs that fix it on, I walked down to get a 
nearer look. My next glimpse was from the 
bridge of Sant' Angelo ; but there was no time 
nor space for pause. Foot-passengers crowd- 
ing hither and thither, as they heard the shout 
of Avanti! from the mile of coachmen behind, 
dragoon-horses curtsying backward just where 
there were most women and children to bd 
flattened, and the dome drawing all eyes and 
thoughts the wrong way, made a hubbub tc 
be got out of at any desperate hazard. Be- 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 301 

sides, one could not help feeling nervously 
hurried ; for it seemed quite plain to every- 
body that this starry apparition must be as 
momentary as it was wonderful, and that we 
should find it vanished when we reached the 
piazza. But suddenly you stand in front of 
it, and see the soft travertine of the front suf- 
fused with a tremulous, glooming glow, a mild- 
ened glory, as if the building breathed, and so 
transmuted its shadow into soft pulses of light. 
After wondering long enough, I went back 
to the Pincio, and watched it for an hour 
longer. But I did not wish to see it go out. 
It seemed better to go home and leave it still 
trembling, so that I could fancy a kind of per- 
manence in it, and half believe I should find 
it there again some lucky evening. Before 
leaving it altogether, I went away to cool 
my eyes with darkness, and came back sev- 
eral times ; and every time it was a new 
miracle, the more so that it was a human 
piece of faery-work. Beautiful as fire is in 
itself, I suspect that part of the pleasuie is 



302 A FEW BITS 

metaphysical, and that the sense of playing 
with an element which can be so terrible adds 
to the zest of the spectacle. And then fire is 
not the least degraded by it, because it is not 
utilized. If beauty were in use, the factory 
would add a grace to the river, and we should 
turn from the fire-writing on the wall of 
heaven to look at a message printed by the 
magnetic telegraph. There may be a beauty 
in the use itself; but utilization is always 
downward, and it is this feeling that makes 
Schiller's Pegasus in yoke so universally pleas- 
ing. So long as the curse of work clings to 
man, he w T ill see beauty only in play. The 
capital of the most frugal commonwealth in 
the world burns up five thousand dollars a 
year in gunpowder, and nobody murmurs. 
Provident Judas wished to utilize the oint- 
ment, but the Teacher would rather that it 
Bhould be wasted in poem. 

The best lesson in aesthetics I ever got (and 
like most good lessons, it fell from the lips of 
no regular professor) was from an Irishman 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 303 

an the day the Nymph Cochituate was for- 
mally introduced to the people of Boston. I 
made one with other rustics in the streets, 
admiring the dignitaries in coaches with as 
much Christian charity as is consistent with 
an elbow in the pit of your stomach and a heel 
on that toe which is your only inheritance from 
two excellent grandfathers. Among other al- 
legorical phenomena, there came along what 
I should have called a hay-cart, if I had not 
known it was a triumphal car, filled with that 
fairest variety of mortal grass which with us 
is apt to spindle so soon into a somewhat sap- 
less womanhood. Thirty-odd young maidens 
in white gowns, with blue sashes and pink 
wreaths of French crape, represented the 
United States. (How shall we limit our num- 
ber, by the way, if ever Utah be admitted ?) 
The ship, the printing-press, even the wondrous 
train of express-wagons, and other solid bits 
of civic fantasy, had left my Hibernian neigh- 
bor unmoved. But this brought him down. 
Turning to me, as the mos* appreciative pub- 



504 A FEW BITS 

lie for the moment, with face of as much de» 

light as if his head had been broken, he cried, 
" Now this is raly beautiful ! Tothally reg- 
yardless uv expinse ! " Methought my shirt- 
sleeved lecturer on the Beautiful had hit at 
least one nail full on the head. Voltaire but 
epigrammatized the same thought when he 
said, Le superflu, chose tres-necessaire. 

As for the ceremonies of the Church, one 
need not waste time in seeing many of them. 
There is a dreary sameness in them, and one 
can take an hour here and an hour there, as 
it pleases him, just as sure of finding the same 
pattern as he would be in the first or last yard 
of a roll of printed cotton. For myself, I do 
not like to go and look with mere curiosity at 
what is sacred and solemn to others. To how 
many these Roman shows are sacred, I cannot 
guess ; but certainly the Romans do not value 
them much. I walked out to the grotto of 
Egeria on Easter Sunday, that I might not be 
tempted down to St. Peter's to see the mock 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 305 

ery of Pio Nemo's benediction. It is certainly 
Christian, for he blesses them that curse him, 
and does all the good which the waving of his 
fingers can do to people who would use him 
despitefully if they had the chance. I told an 
Italian servant she might have the day ; but 
she said she did not care for it. 

" But," urged I, " will you not go to rece.'ve 
the blessing of the Holy Father?" 

"No, sir." 

" Do you not wish it ? " 

" Not in the least : Ms blessing would do me 
no good. If I get the blessing of Heaven, it 
will serve my turn." 

There were three families of foreigners in 
our house, and I believe none of the Italian 
servants went to St. Peter's that day. Yet 
they commonly speak kindly of Pius. I have 
heard the same phrase from several Italians of 
the working-class. " He is a good man," they 
said, "but ill-led." 

What one sees in the streets of Rome is 
worth more than what one sees in the churches. 



806 A FEW BITS 

The churches themselves are generally ugly. 
St. Peter's has crushed all the life out of archi- 
tectural genius, and all the modern churches 
look as if they were swelling themselves in imi- 
tation of the great Basilica. There is a clumsy 
magnificence about them, and their heaviness 
oppresses you. Their marble incrustations 
look like a kind of architectural elephan- 
tiasis, and the parts are puffy with a dropsi- 
cal want of proportion. There is none of the 
spring and soar which one may see even in 
the Lombard churches, and a Roman column 
standing near one of them, slim and gentleman- 
like, satirizes silently their tawdry parvenuism. 
Attempts at mere bigness are ridiculous in a 
city where the Colosseum still yawns in crater- 
like ruin, and where Michael Angelo made a 
noble church out of a single room in Diocle- 
tian's baths. 

Shall I confess it ? Michael Angelo seems 
to me, in his angry reaction against sentimen- 
tal beauty, to have mistaken bulk and brawn 
"or the antithesis of feebleness. He is the 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 367 

apostle of the exaggerated, the Victor Hugo 
of painting and sculpture. I have a feeling 
that rivalry was a more powerful motive with 
him than love of art, that he had the con- 
scious intention to be original, which seldom 
leads to anything better than being extrav&» 
gant. The show of muscle proves strength, 
not power ; and force for mere force's sake in 
art makes one think of Milo caught in his own 
log. This lib my second tnougnt, ana Strikes; 
me as perhaps somewhat niggardly toward one 
in whom you cannot help teeiing there was so 
vast a possibility. And then his Eve, his Da- 
vid, his Sibyls, his Prophets, his Sonnets . 
Well, I take it all back, and come round to 
St. Peter's again just to hint that I doubt about 
domes. In Rome they «ire «« nmnh the fash- 
ion that I felt as it they were the gmtre ul 
architecture. Generally they look heavy. 
Those on St. Mark's in Venice are the only 
tight ones I ever saw, and they look almost 
Airy, like tents puffed out with wind. I srn>» 
pose one must be satisfied with the interior 



308 A FEW BITS 

effect, which is certainly noble it. St. Peter's. 
But for impressiveness both within and with- 
out there is nothing like a Gothic cathedral for 
me, nothing that crowns a city so nobly, or 
makes such an island of twilight silence in the 
midst of its noonday clamors. 

Now as to what one sees in the streets, the 
beggars are certainly the first things that draw 
the eye. Beggary is an institution here. The 
Church has sanctified it by the establishment 
of mendicant orders, and indeed it is the nat- 
ural result of a social system where the non- 
producing class makes not only the laws, but 
the ideas. The beggars of Rome go far toward 
proving the diversity of origin in mankind, for 
on them surely the curse of Adam never fell. 
It is easier to fancy that Adam Vaarien, the 
first tenant of the Fool's Paradise, after suck- 
ing his thumbs for a thousand years, took to 
wife Eve Faniente, and became the progenitor 
of this race, to whom also he left a calendar 
in which three hundred and sixty-five days ir 
the year were made feasts, sacred from aL 



OF ROMAIs MOSAIC. 309 

lecular labor. Accordingly, they not merely 
do nothing, but they do it assiduously and al- 
most with religious fervor. I have seen an- 
cient members of this sect as constant at their 
accustomed street-corner as the bit of broken 
column on which they sat ; and when a man 
does this in rainy weather, as rainy weather 
is in Rome, he has the spirit of a fanatic and 
martyr. 

It is not that the Italians are a lazy people." 
On the contrary, I am satisfied that they are in- 
dustrious so far as they are allowed to be. But, 
as I said before, when a Roman does nothing, 
he does it in the high Roman fashion. A friend 
of mine was having one of his rooms arranged 
for a private theatre, and sent for a person who 
was said to be an expert in the business to do 
it for him. After a day's trial, he was satisfied 
that his lieutenant was rather a hinderance 
than a help, and resolved to dismiss him. 

44 What is your charge for your day's ser- 
vices ? " 

" Two scudi, sir.' 



310 A FEW BITS 

" Two scudi ! Five pauls would be too 
much. You have done nothing but stand with 
your hands in your pockets and get in the 
way of other people." 

" Lordship is perfectly right ; but that is 
my way of working." 

It is impossible for a stranger to say who 
may not beg in Rome. It seems to be a sud- 
den madness that may seize any one at the 
sight of a foreigner. You see a very re- 
spectable-looking person in the street, and it 
is odds but, as you pass him, his hat comes 
off, his whole figure suddenly dilapidates itself, 
assuming a tremble of professional weakness, 
and you hear the everlasting qualche cosa per 
varitd! You are in doubt whether to drop a 
bajoccho into the next cardinal's hat which 
offers you its sacred cavity in answer to your 
salute. You begin to believe that the hat was 
invented for the sole purpose of ingulfing cop- 
pers, and that its highest type is the grea* 
Triregno itself, into which the pence of Petei 
rattle. 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 311 

But you soon learn to distinguish the estab- 
lished beggars, and to the three professions 
elsewhere considered liberal jou add a fourth 
for this latitude, — mendicancy. Its professors 
look upon themselves as a kind of guild which 
ought to be protected by the government. 1 
fell into talk with a woman who begged of me 
in the Colosseum. Among other things she 
complained that the government did not at all 
consider the poor. 

" Where is the government that does ? " I 
said. 

"Uh gid ! Excellency ; but this government 
lets beggars from the country come into Rome, 
which is a great injury to the trade of us born 
Romans. There is Beppo, for example ; he 
is a man of property in his own town, and has 
a dinner of three courses every day. He has 
portioned two daughters with three thousand 
scudi each, and left Rome during the time of 
the Republic with the rest of the nobilitj." 

At first, one is shocked and pained at the 
exhibition of deformities m the street But 



312 A FEW BITS 

by and by he comes to look upon them with 
little more emotion than is excited by seeing 
the tools of any other trade. The melancholy 
of the beggars is purely a matter of business ; 
and they look upon their maims as Fortunatus 
purses, which will always give them money. 
A withered arm they present to you as a high- 
wayman would his pistol ; a goitre is a life- 
annuity ; a St. Vitus dance is as good as an 
engagement as prima ballerina at the Apollo ; 
and to have no legs at all is to stand on the 
best footing with fortune. They are a merry 
race, on the whole, and quick-witted, like the 
rest of their countrymen. I believe the regu- 
lar fee for a beggar is a quattiino, about a 
quarter of a cent ; but they expect more of 
foreigners. A friend of mine once crave one 
of these tiny coins to an old woman ; she deli- 
cately expressed her resentment by exclaim- 
ing, "Thanks, signoria. God will reward 
wen you ! " 

A begging friar came to me one day with a 
lubscription for repairing his convent. "Ah, 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 313 

but I am a heretic," said I. " Undoubtedly," 
with a shrug, implying a respectful acknowl- 
edgment of a foreigner's right to choose warm 
and dry lodgings in the other world as well 
as in this, "but your money is perfectly or- 
thodox." 

Another favorite way of doing nothing is 
to excavate the Forum. I think the Fanien- 
tes like this all the better, because it seems a 
kind of satire upon work, as the witches par- 
ody the Christian offices of devotion at their 
Sabbath. A score or so of old men in volu- 
minous cloaks shift the earth from one side of 
a large pit to the other, in a manner so lei- 
surely that it is positive repose to look at them. 
The most bigoted anti-Fourierist might ac- 
knowledge this to be attractive industry. 

One conscript father trails a small barrow 
up to another, who stands leaning on a long 
spade. Arriving, he fumbles for his snuff- 
box, and offers it deliberately to his friend. 
Each takes an ample pinch, and both seat 
themselves to await ths result. Tf one should 
u 



314 A FEW BITS 

sneeze, he receives the Felicitd ! of the other • 
and, after allowing the titillation to subside, he 
replies, Qrazia I Then follows a little conver- 
sation, and then they prepare to load. But it 
occurs to the barrow-driver that this is a good 
opportunity to fill and light his pipe ; and to 
do so conveniently he needs his barrow to sit 
upon. He draws a few whiffs, and a little 
more conversation takes place. The barrow 
is now ready ; but first the wielder of the 
spade will fill his pipe also. This done, more 
whiffs and more conversation. Then a spoon- 
ful of earth is thrown into the barrow, and it 
starts on its return. But midway it meets an 
empty barrow, and both stop to go through 
the snuff-box ceremonial once more, and to 
discuss whatever new thing has occurred in 
the excavation since their last encounter. 
And so it goes on all day. 

As I see more of material antiquity, I be- 
gin to suspect that my interest in it is most 
j factitious. The relations of races to the 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 31£ 

physical world (only to be studied fruitfully 
on the spot) ao not excite in me an interest 
at all proportionate to that I feel in their in- 
fluence on the moral advance of mankind, 
which one may as easily trace in his own li- 
brary as on the spot. The only useful remark 
I remember to have made here is, that, the sit- 
uation of Rome being far less strong than that 
of any city of the Etruscan league, it must 
have been built where it is for purposes of 
commerce. It is the most defensible point 
near the mouth of the Tiber. It is only as 
rival trades-folk that Rome and Carthage had 
any comprehensible cause of quarrel. It is 
only as a commercial people that we can un- 
derstand the early tendency of the Romans 
towards democracy. As for antiquity, after 
reading history, one is haunted by a discom- 
forting suspicion that the names so painfully 
deciphered in hieroglyphic or arrow-head in- 
scriptions are only so many more Smiths and 
Browns masking it in unknown tongues. 
Moreover, if we YanK^es are twitted with not 



816 A FEW BITS 

knowing the difference between big and great^ 
may not those of us who have learned it turn 
round on many a monument over here with 
the same reproach ? I confess I am begin- 
ning to sympathize with a countryman of ours 
from Michigan, who asked our Minister to di- 
rect him to a specimen ruin and a specimen 
gallery, that he might see and be rid of them 
once for all. I saw three young Englishmen 
going through the Vatican by catalogue and 
number, the other day, in a fashion which John 
Bull is apt to consider exclusively American. 
"Number 300 ! " says the one with catalogue 
and pencil, " have you seen it ? " " Yes," 
answer his two comrades, and, checking it off, 
he goes on with Number 301. Having wit- 
nessed the unavailing agonies of many Anglo- 
Saxons from both sides of the Atlantic in their 
effort to have the correct sensation before 
many hideous examples of antique bad taste, 
my heart warmed toward my business-like 
British cousins, who were doing their aesthetics 
in this thrifty auctioneer fashion. Our cart* 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 317 

before-horse education, which makes us more 
familiar with the history and literature of 
Greeks and Romans than with those of our 
own ancestry, (though there is nothing in an- 
cient art to match Shakespeare or a Gothic 
minster,) makes us the gulls of what we call 
classical antiquity. In sculpture, to be sure, 
they have us on the hip. Europe were worth 
visiting, if only to be rid of this one old man 
of the sea. 

I am not ashamed to confess a singular sym- 
pathy with what are known as the Middle 
Ages. I cannot help thinking that few pe- 
riods have left behind them such traces of 
inventiveness and power. Nothing is more 
tiresome than the sameness of modern cities ; 
and it has often struck me that this must also 
have been true of those ancient ones in which 
Greek architecture or its derivatives pre- 
vailed, — true at least as respects public build- 
ings. But mediaeval towns, especially in Ita- 
ly, even when only fiftv miles asunder, have 
an individuality of character as marked as thai 



518 A FEW BITS 

of trees. Nor is it merely this originality that 
attracts me, but likewise the sense that, how- 
ever old, they are nearer to me in being mod- 
ern and Christian. I find it harder to bridge 
over the gulf of Paganism than of centuries. 
Apart from any difference in the men, I had 
a far deeper emotion when I stood on the Sas- 
eo di Dante, than at Horace's Sabine farm or 
by the tomb of Virgil. The latter, indeed, in- 
terested me chiefly by its association with com- 
paratively modern legend; and one of the 
buildings I am most glad to have seen in Rome 
is the Bear Inn, where Montaigne lodged on 
his arrival. 

I think it must have been for some such 
reason that I liked my Florentine better than 
my Roman walks, though I am vastly more 
contented with merely being in Rome. Flor- 
ence is more noisy ; indeed, I think it the 
noisiest town I was ever in. What with the 
continual jangling of its bells, the rattle of 
Austrian drums, and the street-cries, Aneora 
mi raccapriccia. The Italians are a vocifer 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 319 

ous people, and most so among thein the Flor- 
entines. Walking through a back street one 
day, I saw an old woman higgling with a peri- 
patetic dealer, who, at every interval afforded 
him by the remarks of his veteran antagonist, 
would tip his head on one side, and shout, with 
a kind of wondering enthusiasm, as if he could 
hardly trust the evidence of his own senses 
to such loveliness, 0, die bellezza! che belle-e- 
ezza ! The two had been contending as obsti- 
nately as the Greeks and Trojans over the body 
of Patroclus, and I was curious to know what 
was the object of so much desire on the one 
side and admiration on the other. It was a 
half-dozen of weazeny baked pears, beggarly 
remnant of the day's traffic. Another time 
I stopped before a stall, debating whether to 
buy some fine-looking peaches. Before I had 
made up my mind, the vender, a stout fellow, 
with a voice like a prize-bull of Bashan, opened 
a mouth round and large as the muzzle of a 
blunderbuss, and let fly into my ear the fol low- 
ing pertinent observation : " Belle pesche / belh 



320 A FEW BITS 

pe-e-eschef" (crescendo.') I stared at him in 
stunned bewilderment ; but, seeing that he had 
reloaded and was about to fire again, took to 
my heels, the exploded syllables rattling after 
me like so many buckshot. A single turnip 
is argument enough with them till midnight ; 
nay, I have heard a ruffian yelling over a cov- 
ered basket, which, I am convinced, was emp- 
ty, and only carried as an excuse for his stu- 
pendous vocalism. It never struck me before 
what a quiet people Americans are. 

Of the pleasant places w r ithin easy walk of 
Rome, I prefer the garden of the Villa Albani, 
as being most Italian. One does not go to 
Italy for examples of Price on the Picturesque. 
Compared with landscape-gardening, it is Ra- 
cine to Shakespeare, I grant; but it has its 
own charm, nevertheless. I like the balus- 
traded terraces, the sun-proof laurel walks, the 
vases and statues. It is only in such a ch- 
elate that it does not seem inhuman to thrust 
a naked statue out of doors. Not to speak of 
their incongruity, how dreary do those white 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 321 

figures look at Fountains Abbey in that shrewd 
Yorkshire atmosphere ! To put them there 
shows the same bad taste that led Prince Po- 
lonia, as Thackeray calls him, to build an arti- 
ficial ruin within a mile of Rome. But I doubt 
if the Italian garden will bear transplantation. 
Farther north, or under a less constant sun- 
shine, it is but half-hardy at the best. Within 
the city, the garden of the French Academy is 
my favorite retreat, because little frequented ; 
and there is an arbor there in which I have 
read comfortably (sitting where the sun could 
reach me) in January. By the way, there 
is something very agreeable in the way these 
people have of making a kind of fireside of the 
sunshine. With us it is either too hot or too 
cool, or we are too busy. But, on the other 
hand, they have no such thing as a chimney- 
corner. 

Of course I haunt the collections of art 
faithfully ; but my favorite gallery, after all, 
is the street. There I always find something 
entertaining, at least. r The other day, on my 

14* u 



322 A FEW BITS 

way to the Colonna Palace, I passed the Foun 
tain of Trevi, from which the water is now 
shut off on account of repairs to the aqueduct. 
A scanty rill of soap-sudsy water still trickled 
from one of the conduits, and, seeing a crowd, 
I stopped to find out what nothing or other 
had gathered it. One charm of- Rome is that 
nobody has anything in particular to do, or, if 
he has, can always stop doing it on the slight- 
est pretext. I found that some eels had been 
discovered, and a very vivacious hunt was go- 
ing on, the chief Nimrods being boys. I hap- 
pened to be the first to see a huge eel wrig- 
gling from the mouth of a pipe, and pointed 
him out. Two lads at once rushed upon him. 
One essayed the capture with his naked hands, 
the other, more provident, had armed himself 
with a rag of woollen cloth with which to 
maintain his grip more securely. Hardly had 
this latter arrested his slippery prize, when 
a ragged rascal, watching his opportunity, 
matched away the prize, and instantly secured 
t by thrusting the head into his mouth, and 



OF ROMAN MOSAIC. 323 

closing on it a set of teeth like an ivory vice. 
But alas for ill-got gain ! Rob Roy's 

" Good old plan, 
That he should take who has the power, 
And he should keep who can/' 

did not serve here. There is scarce a square 
rood in Rome without one or more stately 
cocked hats in it, emblems of authority and 
police. I saw the flash of the snow-white 
cross-belts, gleaming through that dingy crowd 
like the panache of Henri Quatre at Ivry, I 
saw the mad plunge of the canvas-shielded 
head-piece, sacred and terrible as that of Gess- 
ler; and while the greedy throng were dan- 
cing about the anguilliceps, each taking his 
chance twitch at the undulating object of all 
wishes, the captor dodging his head hither and 
thither, (vulnerable, like Achilles, only in his 
'eel, as a British tourist would say,) a pair of 
broad blue shoulders parted the assailants as a 
ship's bows part a wave, a pair of blue arms, 
terminating in gloves of Berlin thread, were 
itretched forth, not in benediction, one hand 



824 R OMA N MOSAIC. 

grasped the slippery Briseis by the waist, the 
other bestowed a cuff on the jaw-bone of 
Achilles, which loosened (rather by its author- 
ity than its physical force) the hitherto refrac- 
tory incisors, a snuffy bandanna was produced, 
the prisoner was deposited in this temporary 
watch-house, and the cocked hat sailed majes- 
tically away with the property thus seques- 
tered for the benefit of the state. 

" Gaudeant anguillaa si mortuus sit homo ille, 
Qui, quasi morte reas, excruciabat eas ! " 

If you have got through that last sentence 
frithout stopping for breath, you are fit to be- 
gin on the Homer of Chapman, who, both as 
translator and author, has the longest wind, 
(especially for a comparison,) without being 
long-winded, of all writers I know anything 
of, not excepting Jeremy Taylor. 



